手取り14万円から、いきなり看護師国家試験に合格！　シングルマザーが直感と猛勉強で掴んだ逆転の人生

From a 140,000-Yen Salary to Registered Nurse! How This Single Mom Fought the Odds with Intuition and 13-Hour Study Days

Hello, everyone! Do you have something you want to do, but think it’s completely out of your reach? As long as you have the desire to try, the possibility is never zero. To live a life without regrets, you just have to go for it. When you work hard, unexpected help often comes out of nowhere. If you’ve just been looking on enviously at what you want, I have great news for you. I’m going to tell you a story about someone who turned a seemingly impossible "zero chance" into a perfect "reality." And truth be told, that someone is me.

I am a single mother. I took on a certain challenge to send my son to college. Everyone criticized me, saying things like, "That’s absolutely impossible! It’s a total waste of time, so just find a regular job where someone will hire you." It felt like they were snipping off a flower bud right at the stem just as it was about to bloom. But my intuition was spot on, and I passed the national nursing exam.

When I was 36, I worked as a factory clerk, and my take-home pay at the time was about 140,000 yen a month. Looking at my pay stub, I felt deeply saddened, thinking, "I can’t send my son to college with this." Knowing I had to do something, I went to a bookstore and looked at a list of certification exams I might be able to take. That's when the "registered nurse" qualification caught my eye. As I researched various nursing schools, I found an incredible school that had no entrance fee and a monthly tuition of just 5,000 yen. I thought, "This is it! I’m going to this school!"

However, it turned out to be a public nursing school, and the past acceptance rate was highly competitive, with an applicant-to-slot ratio of 13.2 to 1! Normally, most people would think "it's impossible for me" at that point. But instinctively, I just knew I would pass. The exam subjects were English, Math, and Japanese. Math was my biggest headache. I found a book of past exam questions, but when I opened it, I realized how terribly rusty my brain was—even though it was written in Japanese, I couldn’t even understand the questions. I was completely clueless, thinking, "What’s a prime number?" or "Factoring? I think I've heard of that before." Back in high school, I thought math was completely useless in life, so I had written it off as long as I didn’t get a failing grade. Yet, even so, my intuition told me, "I can make this work."

From that moment, my ordeal began. Since I had absolutely no grasp of high school math, I bought textbooks and workbooks for middle school students to solidify the basics first before moving on to high school-level math. At that time, I was divorced, had my child with me, and was living at my parents' house. Both my father and mother criticized me harshly, saying, "Even fresh high school graduates fail that nursing school! How old do you think you are? Stop being reckless, just work at 7-Eleven for 850 yen an hour, and you can get the single-parent allowance anyway!"

But once I make up my mind, I never listen to anyone—that’s just my nature. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and studied until around midnight, putting in a solid 13 hours of study a day. I only slept for 5 hours. With only six months left until the nursing school entrance exam, trying to master high school math in such a short time meant I was taking on an incredibly high hurdle.

As I struggled with math proof questions, I went to a local cram school to ask if they could teach me just math. When they asked, "What grade is your child in?" and I replied, "It’s not for my child, I want to study," the teacher looked completely freaked out. And honestly, fair enough! I don't remember exactly, but the tuition was too expensive, so I gave up on that and became completely self-taught. However, since I only had six months until the exam, I analyzed past exam questions and focused exclusively on studying math tailored specifically for this nursing school. Fortunately, the exam trends didn’t change; if they had revamped the math exam, I would have been finished.

My son was only about four years old at the time. A Doraemon video was playing every single day. He would dump out all the toys from his plastic storage box onto the floor and constantly say, "Mommy, find that toy for me~" day in and day out. It was a brutal study regime while keeping a toddler entertained. Looking back, I think my level of concentration was insane.

Then came the day of the exam. After it was over, I felt a solid sense of achievement. As for math, I knew I hadn't answered the final proof question. Still, I was confident I got about 90% of it right. I liked English when I was a student, so I probably scored a perfect 100. I figured I scored around 90% in Japanese as well, just like in math.

On the day the results were posted, the joy of seeing my exam number, "No. 26"—which I will never forget—was extraordinary, and tears rushed to my eyes. The bulletin board with the results was inside the ward office. Since I couldn’t stop crying for a while, I turned toward the wall to hide my crying face. A ward official approached me and asked, "Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?" Since I had no one there to celebrate with, I dragged this official into my moment, asking, "Number 26 is definitely there, right? I passed, didn’t I?!" and made them celebrate with me. The official even pumped his fist and shouted, "Yes! All right!"

A little later, when I finally got my official acceptance letter, I showed it to my parents who had doubted me. It felt just like a classic movie scene where you throw down the ultimate proof and say, "Bow down before this emblem!"

But the acceptance letter wasn't the end of it. Shortly after, I received a bill for 270,000 yen for training uniforms and nearly three years' worth of textbooks. It was so expensive! Since I was completely broke from focused studying, I decided to take a job packing frozen foods. Back then, there was plenty of work, and they would say, "Just come in for a day or two if you can." I worked every single day except for four Sundays that month and earned exactly 170,000 yen.

And so, my grueling days in nursing school began. Thinking to myself, "I have never studied this hard in my entire life," I managed to survive those intensely strict nursing student days, all while making sure never to miss my son’s monthly school observation days.

What sticks out in my mind about studying for the national exam is how anxious I felt. Even as a third-year student, the questions were so difficult that I could barely solve any past exam problems. But it all came down to analyzing trends and strategies. There are certain questions that come up every single year, and if you master those perfectly, you'll be fine. At the time, anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry only accounted for about one question on the exam, so I completely cut them out of my prep. Just like a university, nursing school required us to attend classes, earn credits, go to clinical practice, and on top of all that, write a nursing thesis similar to a graduation thesis. To make things even more intense, there was job hunting too. I climbed out of that hellishly difficult nursing school life and finally passed the national exam. It was an ultimate test of endurance, split into morning and afternoon sessions lasting all day long, but I finally grabbed my qualification.

I still remember the day of the exam. My father drove me to the test site, and in the car, he put massive pressure on me, saying, "You’ve been eating free meals under my roof for three years, so you better make sure you pass." I attended the nursing school graduation party wearing a gorgeous hakama. I remember renting the absolute best one, which left me with exactly 2,000 yen in my wallet.

However, even after successfully becoming a nurse, an even deeper hell was waiting for me. In nursing school, we had almost no hands-on practical training; it was mostly studying from textbooks. In other words, I had never given an injection or started an IV line before. Becoming a registered nurse at the age of 40, I experienced a terrible amount of bullying because I couldn't do anything practical despite my older age. The bullying from the licensed practical nurses (LPNs) was especially brutal. But with my naturally positive spirit, I clenched my teeth and pushed through, telling myself, "No matter what they say, I am a fully licensed registered nurse. Blood draws and injections will be fine once I get used to them."

I will write more about my intense experiences with workplace relationships at the hospital in future posts, day by day. Please look forward to it!

No matter what, it is always better to trust your intuition and just try. The applicant ratio when I took the actual exam was about 6 to 1. But the reason I wasn’t intimidated by the 13.2x ratio I saw in the bookstore was because I trusted my gut. Today, many nursing schools have turned into four-year universities. But back then, the school I graduated from was the backup choice for students trying to get into the health sciences department of a prestigious national university school of medicine. Considering my background of graduating from a notoriously low-ranked high school, what kind of determination do you think it took for me to take that exam against fresh high school graduates? My mindset for winning against those elite students—even though I wasn't highly academic—was an incredibly radical one: "I am going to get a perfect 100 on every single subject." In reality, I’m sure I didn’t get a perfect score on everything, but I am confident I came incredibly close.