Cassandra
                       by Amanda Miller

Sometimes you have to speak your mind, even if it means you will be hated for the duration of your academic career. Sometimes you have to be outspoken because the sheep are too stupid to sense danger.

When I was in Nursing school, there was a girl who had a "learning disability". It was documented that she was dyslexic and ADD/ADHD and a bunch of other things that meant she got extra time to take tests and she was assigned a note taker. I got the job of photocopying my notes after every class and handing them over to her.

Soon, I started questioning her presence in Nursing school and the appropriateness of allowing someone who mixed up numbers and letters and had a short attention span to be in a profession where one small mix-up on a dosage of a drug could mean death for a patient.

I began watching this girl and seeing her cover up her mistakes. She would copy the Blood Pressure readings from the night before rather than take them herself. This could spell disaster if she were to miss a deadly drop in someone's pressure. She would fake temperature results and she would ask others to change her patients or bathe them or feed them. Her excuses seemed plausible at first, but then a few of us started seeing her for what she really was; a danger to the weakest among us.

I started my campaign to get her out of school by complaining to the instructors, the clinical professors whose licenses we worked under and the head of the college. It seemed that no one believed me. They thought I was being prejudiced against her because of her "disability" or because of her sexual orientation or because she was black. They looked the other way.

The other students began to distrust me. They thought I had a vendetta against blacks or Born Again Christians or lesbians. I became a pariah. They only spoke to me when they needed my notes or they wanted help with a procedure or they needed to study for a test. It didn't help that I was outspoken against the many injustices that went on in our day to day nursing school lives, that I was always the one elected to protest an unclear question on a test. They used me as a voice, but didn't want to hear me outside of the class.

Later the following year, they found out that the student I had protested being in our class had given the wrong medication to the wrong patient. That she had given something the patient was allergic to. The patient was given Benedryl and no ill effects came to pass. The student was dismissed.

No one acknowledged that I had warned them.
No one invited me to their graduation party.

I know how Cassandra felt.

Amanda Miller (aka hazelnutcoffeegirl) started her love affair with coffee when she had to take an 8am chemistry lab for her pre-med studies at Temple University. She quickly abandoned pre-med due to the necessity of being coherent before 11am and went to nursing school. Upon graduation she worked as an ER nurse at a community hospital in Philadelphia. To maintain her sanity, she started writing and joined online poetry circles. After 4 years she abandoned nursing as well, swearing off of the medical profession entirely. Amanda may now be found serving coffee and cookies at 39,000 ft. for an airline with the word “blue” in its name.