I remember the exact moment it struck me. I was lying on a couch bed in Connecticut Children’s Hospital next to my teenage daughter who had pancreatitis, a painful, but treatable inflammation of the pancreas. The intravenous machine steadily dripped pain medication and fluids into her veins. A medical helicopter hovered over Hartford Hospital across the street, where a trauma team was waiting on the roof to save another life. The nicest nurses came into her room to check her blood pressure and temperature and made her feel better just by talking to her. And I remember thinking, Jesus, I’m in the wrong goddamn field.

You see, I had been a journalist at The Hartford Courant for twenty-four years, a police reporter to be exact, and no one loved the job more. I loved going in police cruisers at warp speed. I was fearless, interviewing junkies and drug dealers in bad neighborhoods, responding to whatever the Courant needed me to respond to. I was bitten by a police dog, had smoke inhalation. I was yelled at and threatened by cops. I was doing it in the name of public service.

It all seemed worthwhile, a job that I had wanted to do since I was nine years old. I always felt I was one of the lines in the sand between good cops and bad cops, between corruption and justice. I was part of a large Pulitzer team for breaking news; I was interviewed by Dan Rather for a story on heroin. I was good at what I did and loved my job. I never wanted to do anything else.

Then Sam Zell bought the newspaper, which had already been partially crippled by Tribune’s financial mismanagement. We were told the sale would help us, that we would own the company.

Very quickly, the disgusting e-mails began to emanate from Zell, not about journalism, but about profit. Not about public service, but about the almighty dollar. Equally disturbing were the clueless e-mails from some guy named Lee, who purported to know something about journalism, but obviously had never picked up any newspaper other than a tabloid. Then layoffs, and buyouts. And suddenly, I felt dirty, like all the cops who always yelled at me that I was just trying to get the page-one story to sell another newspaper were right all along.

Adding to that stress, between late 2007 and 2008, my daughter was hospitalized, I had surgery for a (thankfully benign) mass in my breast, and my mother had cancer. During these hospitalizations, I watched compassionate nurses and doctors perform their tasks with care and empathy. Sure they make money, but I bet they don’t get letters from the president of the hospital urging them to make more of a profit.

And somewhere between my daughter’s hospitalization, my own surgery, and seeing my mother treated successfully at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, I decided to leave what I had thought would be a lifelong career in journalism.

I decided to become a nurse.

The decision did not come easily. I spent many nights lying awake in bed, thinking about it. I cried all the time, even one day in the break room because I could not believe I would no longer make cop checks, listen to a police scanner, run when breaking news happened—things I had done professionally since I was seventeen. But quite frankly, I dislike this new journalism, how newspapers have tried to reinvent themselves and instead have become more and more like television. I fought taking a digital camera and shooting a fire, like some nosy neighbor.

I thought I would have more time to think about it, take some night and weekend courses toward nursing. I didn’t think another buyout offer would come so soon. Then, in late June, the Courant offered a lucrative buyout, the second one since March.

Tracy Gordon Fox is a former reporter at The Hartford Courant.