Year 4: Travel Nursing
From the beginning of my nursing journey I had wanted to work in Labor & Delivery. I fell in love with prenatal education when working for Early Head Start and wanted to do more with it. I mistakenly thought nursing was the best way. Now I know that's not quite right for me, but I don't regret becoming a nurse even one bit. I love the work I do. Anyway... around here L&D is very hard to get into. Once people start working there they don't leave until they retire. After my first year they had one opening but they hired a new grad, which killed me a little inside. But she had been a CNA on the unit and it was a good hire for them. They posted a second position but somehow it turned out that when they hired the new grad she was in a "new grad" position, but that didn't actually count as an L&D position, so they had to either hire her to the opening, or she would have to move to another department, which made no sense at all. I don't begrudge anyone for keeping her. Maybe a year after that they had another position come open. There was a nurse working with me on MedSurg who had years of L&D experience but she said she wasn't interested in the job because it was full time nights, so I thought I was a shoe-in. Except at the last minute she decided to apply and they hired her instead. Again, can't really blame them for hiring someone with more than a decade of experience over someone with no true L&D nursing experience. But I was so frustrated, and by then I was kind of over MedSurg. I enjoyed my time while I was there, and I will always be glad for the experience I gained in the 2 years there. But MedSurg was not my goal or my passion and I felt frustrated after being passed over for a position three separate times. I needed a change. And we needed money. We weren't desperately poor or anything, but money was tight. I said something to my husband, only half joking, that I if we didn't have family and obligations here I would go do travel nursing because it pays twice as much as being a staff nurse just about anywhere. We started toying with the idea and before I knew it I was heading to Alaska to live with my cousin, also a nurse, and work in a hospital there for 3-4 months. The stressful part is hard to describe. Obviously traveling the entire way across the country with my kids but without my husband, to work in a new hospital with people I didn't know was stressful. But the biggest stressor that affected the entire experience was that when I got there the state was back-logged on processing nursing licenses, and I had to wait an extra few weeks before I could start work, which basically negated the "extra" money I got the first few weeks of work. Thankfully we (the kids and I) were living with my cousin, and she leant me enough money to live on and pay bills those first few weeks. But the worst part of all was FaceTiming with my husband as he cried and begged me to fix what I just couldn't fix right then. He wanted me to go work at McDonalds or somewhere until the license thing got straightened out. But by the time I applied, had an interview, got hired, and went through orientation etc., I would be working in the hospital. It would have been a complete waste of time and I'd still have nothing to show for it. It was excruciating spending the day doing nothing and waiting for a phone call from my husband, knowing how stressed he was and that I had nothing new to tell him. I finally started working mid-July. In August my husband flew out and spent a couple weeks with us and then took the girls home to start school. I finished my contract through mid-October and flew home just in time for my daughter's birthday. We did make enough to make it worth it financially. But I was unsettled the entire time. I'm not sure I ever fully got over it. When I came back to Maine there were limited options for travel contracts so I ended up in one about 2 hours away from home. You'd think being closer to home would be easier, and it was definitely nice to see my family more often. But I was just living out of a suitcase. Always in limbo, feeling like I wasn't actually living anywhere. Having to figure out the schedule of transporting kids and grocery shopping when I was never around. In some ways it was harder than just being away for 3-4 months. When that contract was up I hoped to get back into my home hospital. The only opening they had was in the ICU/ER. These weren't anything I was particularly into or excited about, but I was ready to just be home full time. So in January 2020 I took the job. It was a bit of a learning curve of course, but it was alright. I got to know some more of the staff from different departments in the hospital. And I was just settling into that role when...
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Year 5: CoVID. Need I say more?
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