The Nurse I Never Became

When I was younger, I wanted to be a nurse.

Not because I'd watched too many hospital dramas or imagined myself heroically saving lives every day, but because I genuinely liked looking after people. It seemed like meaningful, practical work; the kind of job where, if you did it well, someone else's day was a little better because you'd been there.

That was the plan, until I was diagnosed with HIV at the age of twenty.

When I was diagnosed in 2006, the rules in place meant that the area of nursing I had hoped to enter was closed to people living with HIV.

Almost overnight, the future I'd been imagining quietly disappeared.

Looking back, I don't remember making some dramatic decision not to become a nurse. Life is rarely that theatrical. Instead, the path simply narrowed until, eventually, I found myself walking in a different direction.

I've often wondered what kind of nurse I might have been.

Perhaps I'd have been wonderfully compassionate.

Perhaps I'd have become one of those reassuring people who somehow make everything feel calmer the moment they walk into a room.

Or perhaps I'd have been the sort who insists, with great confidence, that "this won't hurt a bit" moments before producing a needle the size of a garden fence.

The truth is, I'll never know.

I could have turned out to be Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole... or Nurse Ratched. Thankfully, history will never have to decide.

For a long time, I thought that diagnosis had taken nursing away from me.

Now I'm not so sure.

Over the years, I've realised that the part of nursing that appealed to me wasn't really the uniform, the title or even the hospital. It was the opportunity to help people when they were frightened, uncertain or vulnerable.

On reflection, I seem to have spent much of my adult life doing the very thing that first drew me towards nursing. I've sat with people after difficult diagnoses, listened when they needed someone to listen, volunteered alongside healthcare teams in southern Africa, supported people living with HIV and spent years working with charities and public services whose purpose was, in one way or another, to make life a little better for somebody else.

None of that made me a nurse.

But perhaps the title was never the important part. The instinct was.

Over the years, a few people have told me they think I would have made a good nurse.

It's a lovely thing to hear, although it's impossible for any of us to know.

What I do know is that life has a habit of taking away one version of your future while quietly introducing another. At the time, all you notice is the closed door. It can take years before you realise another one had been standing open all along.

As I write this, I'm sitting in Zambia, where over the past few days I've been walking alongside nurses and community healthcare workers as we visit patients in their homes. Twenty years ago, I thought HIV had closed the door on any future that involved healthcare.

I realise now that it hadn't.

It had simply led me there by a route I never expected.

I never became the nurse I imagined at twenty.

But the desire to make somebody else's day a little better never really disappeared.

It simply found another way of making itself useful.