Where the Little Things Matter: Erin Bowdish’s Journey to an “All-Encompassing” Nursing Career
Editor’s note: Before proceeding, please note that this story discusses pregnancy loss and end of life care.
When Erin Bowdish, ’24 Nursing, talks about her nursing career, she starts by telling stories.
One such story, an encounter she had with an oncology patient, just won her third place in the 2024 Dr. Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest. Her essay “A Quiet Place” will be published in the October 2024 edition of Academic Medicine and the Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, as well as the September/October 2024 edition of the Journal of Professional Nursing.
Erin Bowdish came to nursing as a second career and found meaning and purpose along the way. Photo courtesy of Erin Bowdish
The moment Bowdish wrote about was quiet and seemingly small, but deeply affecting. During her time in nursing school, she was working as a student nurse extern in the medical surgery oncology unit at a local hospital and encountered a patient who was on comfort care. The patient was actively dying, treated only with what they needed to make them comfortable. This particular patient had a dinner tray in front of him and he was all alone.
Another nursing assistant remarked that she was surprised that a comfort care patient was being given food at all, but Bowdish remembered thinking that food is comfort, and she decided to see if he was hungry.
She woke him gently and asked if he wanted to eat anything. “I wanted to know what he preferred to eat, not just shovel food in his mouth,” she remembers. “So I went really slowly through all the food on his plate. I found out he liked the mashed potatoes, but he didn’t like the chicken. It all felt very important to me in that moment because I thought, ‘I’m giving him all the dignity I can right now and all the choice that I can in his circumstance.’”
“And he also liked to keep very clean. So I made sure to wipe his mouth after he finished eating. And then I wanted to do something comforting, so I cleaned his body with warm washcloths before he went to bed. At first he didn’t speak. He was very tired. But then as I was putting him into bed and tucking him in, he said thank you to me and he asked me how I was doing. And he asked because we’re just two human beings, and we knew we’d shared this really special moment together.”
“And that’s where the story ends,” she concludes, “because he went off to sleep before I even answered him. But for me, that was so deeply profound.” The simple moment, two souls in a quiet hospital room, didn’t last long, but its impact did.
“It was a moment to remember to always be that person for your patients, no matter where they are,” Bowdish says.
She wrote her essay to honor that patient, knowing that even though he isn’t here anymore (and she has no idea how and when he passed), “This little thing is one way that I can keep the spirit of what I felt was really meaningful about him alive.”
A second career becomes a calling
It’s all part of her nursing philosophy: for Bowdish, nursing is “all-encompassing.”
“It draws from me every bit of who I am,” she explains. “All my intellectual curiosity, my desire to keep learning to be the best I can be, my desire to serve other people and really to just be with people — at the best moments of their lives and the worst and everything in between.”
She came to nursing after a career in educational communications, including a stint as director of communications for a private school in Los Gatos. What she loved about that career — interacting with families, for example, and “the journey of raising a child” — led her to nursing.
She also saw nursing from a unique vantage point — in her spare time she’d volunteer as an entertainer in children’s hospitals, visiting them during medical procedures dressed as Disney characters or princesses or whatever the child requested to distract and entertain them during difficult times.
“I used to accompany kids to their OT (occupational therapy) or their PT (physical therapy) appointments,” she remembers, “and it was really cool to see how the nurses integrated my role into what they were doing. It was heartwarming to see how happy they were that I came to visit their patients. I realized, ‘These are my people. These are people who lead with the heart, and this is where I want to be.’”
Her husband, a career paramedic, also gets “so much fulfillment” from his job, as she explains, and she thought, “What if I did that, too?”
So right after the COVID-19 lockdown ended, she went back to school. She said it took “a lot of bravery” to take a “three-year plus leap of faith,” but she doesn’t regret it for a second. Her husband’s knowledge of local health care pointed her immediately to San José State. She loved the diversity of the classroom, which helped her learn from a variety of other students’ experiences, and the affordability of the program, which allowed her to switch careers without taking on too much debt.
“I’ve always felt really lucky that I chose to go here for nursing school,” she says.
She also adored her cohort — during her time in nursing school she had her third child, and her cohort could not have been more wonderful. “They supported me so beautifully,” she says. “We always call my daughter the cohort baby. I feel like she belongs a little bit to all of them because they were with me through it all. It was memorable and touching to me that they cared so much about my daughter. I have no doubt this whole cohort is going to go out and do amazing things.”
A newly-graduated BSN and RN, Bowdish has her sights set on a place in a new graduate nurse residency program in the Bay Area. She’s still unsure where she might end up but ultimately hopes to go into pediatrics.
“So much love”
But all that is the prose of her new career; here is more poetry. Bowdish’s passion for her work is best illustrated by another story.
She was placed for a time in a maternity ward at a local hospital, working with a nurse who was helping a woman who’d just delivered a baby who passed away.
“It’s unimaginably difficult,” Bowdish says. “There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you can say. And it’s not natural. You’re taking care of this baby, and you have a special incubator that’s keeping the baby cold instead of warm. You bring your lived experiences into your work, and for me, being a parent, I looked at the mom and that was the hardest thing for me because I kept thinking, ‘I cannot imagine what you are going through right now.’”
“I learned how to take footprints for the baby with my nurse. And I was watching her be so careful with how she was decorating these little footprints. And I remember thinking, ‘This is amazing, because this mom is going to hold on to these footprints for the rest of her life. This might be like a 15 minute task for us in the middle of a really busy day. But this nurse was creating something deeply meaningful for someone else.’”
It was another lesson for Bowdish, another moment to string together with so many others as she begins the next steps of her nursing career.
“I always hold on to that moment and that feeling,” she says. “That’s amazing. That’s so much love.”
