words by Greg Cotto
Illustration by Joe Scordo
Skateboarding and nursing are fundamentally similar in terms of critical thinking, an eye for detail, and skill sets that are only earned through rigorous training and the will to get back up and try again. Constantly testing your mettle and becoming a better, stronger, smarter, and more resilient person is natural. Becoming confident in your ability to recognize what you’re seeing with ease and speed only comes with fucking up, owning it, learning, and adjusting and trying again. And again and again and again, until a skill becomes so natural you lose the ability to explain it to others. Like a part of you.
Complacency and comfort, as well as change and fear, are intrinsic to both. Accepting failure is the process to perfection and is needed to get the thick skin and resiliency to go alongside the skillset of a tried and true nurse or skateboarder. No seasoned vet has gotten to where they are without going through the struggle of learning and fucking up the basics. So gatekeeping, “eating your young”, or talking shit on those with lower skill levels won’t make you a better skateboarder or nurse. Being a skateboarder or nurse is not something you can turn off or take a break from. You won’t be able to walk around the local mall and go past a new handrail without daydreaming what trick you got for it, just as you won’t walk past the person using a walker and portable oxygen, with one red and swollen leg, without thinking of pathology and treatment.
Sometimes, filming that 30 second ledge line gets done on the first few go’s, or it’s a battle over multiple days of filming and takes it all out of you. Sometimes an ambulance comes in and you have the patient settled, on the monitor, IV in, and bloodwork cooking in the lab in 15 minutes. Some weeks you couldn’t put an IV in the broad side of a barn, but the next week, without changing anything, you’ll get them all on the first try. Attention to detail in assessing a new spot or a new patient, critical thinking, interpreting the findings during the assessment and adapting, is one of the more common abilities that make you better respectively.
The first time treating a patient having an active heart attack is nerve racking. What happens if you miss the IV on the first go? It’s the same resiliency learned from skateboarding that allows you to shake it off and immediately try again without wasting more time. Critical and dying patients can be terrifying, especially at first, and the courage it takes to jump, isn’t always on the surface. Once you find it, and keep using it, the fear subsides and that’s when you know you’ve grown.
Within each subculture, there is a wide array of skills with a multitude of routes to get there and everyone will have specific areas in which their skills shine. The variety within skateboarding (ledge, rail, bowl/vert, manual skaters, etc.) is just as diverse in nursing (ER, OR, Med/Surg, ICU, Orthopedic nurses, etc..) and is one of, if not the most, appealing aspect. Nothing holds one back from crossing into another area to pick up skills and broaden knowledge. There will ALWAYS be something new to learn and grow from. It’s one of the greatest appeals to each.
