As of today I have officially lived in my New City for 2 whole weeks. It’s kind of strange being a young single twenty-something woman leaving the place you’ve lived your entire life and establishing a new life in a different state, completely independent of loved ones and all the acquaintances you’re used to seeing on a regular basis. It’s been unbelievable how well it’s all falling into place somehow.
It’s not that I’ve never lived on my own before. I spent 3 years of college in the dorms and had an apartment, so I’m used to having a roommate and taking care of my own domestic needs and responsibilities. I even turned out to be a really tidy person despite being a slob when I was a kid. I guess that bad habit turned around freshman year of college when my roommate and I agreed to have our room be a showroom for campus tours -which required us to keep our room immaculate – in exchange for $250 per semester. Managing bills and finances aren’t an issue for me either, although I’m really needing my paychecks to start rolling in for this new job!
I guess I’m just reflecting on all the phone calls, letters, emails, faxes, and other communications I’ve been able to get worked out in such a short period of time. Practically just two months ago I didn’t even have a job, and in that time I’ve totally established myself here in New City with my new job at New Hospital! Things I had to set up:
- Looked on craigslist.com, contacted lots of people, saw lots of places, settled on one
- Signed a lease, did some background checks on my private landlord, settled initial payments
- Set up new bank account, 403(b) retirement savings account, pension
- Got a new driver’s license for my new state (giving up my old one was tough)
- Update my address with all the businesses and people who need it
- Set up my benefits, find new doctors
- Register my car
- Transfer my insurance policies
My moving day was no piece of cake either. That morning when my brother and I went to pick up our rental truck we got the run around at 2 different locations before we finally got our reserved vehicle, and then while driving it off the lot my brother side-swiped my car and wrecked the bumper. We persevered though and picked up the two guys helping me move and got everything packed up. As we turned onto my new street in New City (more than an hour from home), however, I realized I had forgotten my new house keys. Agh! Thankfully my landlord came after an hour or so and let me borrow his copy of the keys. After everything was moved in, we headed back home and I was exhausted. Yet right before I was about to pass out and go to bed, a pipe burst in the bathroom of my apartment. It was a really bad moving day, to say the least! But now it’s my war story and thankfully it’s all behind me.
It’s strange also being so young and completely financially independent from my parents. I think I may be the first of all my friends who are my age to do so. It’s typical these days for a majority of Americans to move home after college to save money and to remain dependent on their parents for at least a few years, if not into their thirties. I’m part of the minority who are living on their own, have their own benefits, are paying all of their own bills, and like it that way. It’s a little scary though because you sort of feel like that safety net has been pulled away somewhat. I joked with my Mom the other day that I feel like I graduated college and immediately morphed into a 30 year old woman.
I also think it’s interesting to consider that of all my close friends who I’ve known since high school or earlier, I’m the only one who did not pursue a liberal arts education. All of the friends whom I still close to got degrees in subjects like English, History, and Religious Studies. I got a history minor, but not because I intended to, it just worked out that way. My Dad remarked that my career choice may have been the wisest and most lucrative, however I truly admire my friends for pursuing their heart’s interest because that’s what I feel like I did too. Maybe my heart’s just more logical and financially minded…who knows.
Anyway, with all the stresses and chaos of my recent move it seems almost unfair that I’m also studying hardcore for NCLEX as well. Today may mark 2 weeks since I moved here, but tomorrow marks 2 weeks until my test date. I rode out this afternoon and investigated the location where my entire future will be determined…not too bad, I suppose. It was a three-story brick building situated deep within a “business park” and took about 25 minutes to get to from my house. I am now one step more prepared for handling my anxiety on test day. Now I must obtain layered clothing, a water bottle, tissues, Aspirin, a snack, and soothing music for the drive over. These are my weapons to prepare for this battle day. That plus the hours of studying I’ve been putting in. It’s unnerving that my boss knows when I’m testing and that the results are posted publicly on the State Board of Nursing website. This means that she may know before I do whether I passed or failed. Very unnerving indeed.
That’s enough about my personal life for one post! This blog is supposed to be about my experiences at my first job as a nursing graduate working in the operating room. It’ll be nice when I finally get to the operating room…for the last two weeks I’ve only been there once, and I won’t be there again for at least another two weeks. During my second week as an operating room nurse intern I had three days at consortium, another day of general nurse orientation at New Hospital, and got Friday off for Independence Day. Wednesday marked the halfway point of our 6-day consortium classes and we had a quiz. Happily I received a 98% on that and also did very well on the pharmacology quiz that was given Thursday at orientation.
Consortium has been interesting and very educational. We discussed things like legal/ethical/financial considerations, anesthesia, positioning, and how to perform counts in the OR. It gives me a lot to think about and thank goodness I’m actually enjoying it like I thought I would, because it would suck to get this far and realize that OR nursing wasn’t for me! Honestly I do wonder if I will start to miss the patient contact that you get working on regular nursing units, but I think the trade-off and satisfaction of not having to deal with the call bells and patients who drive you up the wall will override the memories of the few nice patients who actually realize and appreciate how much you do for them.
That’s part of the reason I chose the OR. There are a lot of really good reasons that I wanted to go into the OR. I like how clean and precise you have to be, I like how technical it is, I like the team approach, I like that I get to advocate for my patients in a very real way, I like that I’m part of team that is drastically improving lives on a daily case-by-case basis, and I like that I get to focus on just one patient at a time. Those are the good reasons that I wanted this job, and they were the reasons I mentioned on job interviews.
What I didn’t mention was some of the less respectable reasons that I wanted to go into the OR. I was tired of having too many patients who worked me to death, I was tired of call bells and cleaning up incontinence all day every day, and I was tired of psychotic or ornery patients. I was excited by that thought of just one patient at a time. And that patient is unconscious! They even get catheterized in many cases and have been fasting (NPO), so there’s a minimized chance that I will be required to clean up urine or feces. I’m a fan of that idea. Much like an ICU setting, the OR is also a very controlled environment. It may not be the healthiest thing for a control freak like I tend to be sometimes, but it is very fitting to my work personality. Yet at the same time, most people who work in the OR tend to have a sense of irreverence and fun about them, so although the utmost care and caution are taken in every case, it can still be a very enjoyable workplace.
I foresaw that as an OR nurse, I can write my own ticket. It’s a specialized field of nursing that you can’t just walk right into like you might be able to in an area like med-surg, so I’m more valued in some arenas. I foresaw that I can work in hospitals working every shift (days/evenings/nights) and make a higher salary there while I’m young, then when I’m older and have children I can go work in an outpatient surgi-center and work an 8-5 schedule. Or I can work per diem or just weekends. You don’t have that same kind of control over your time and work locations when you’re a med-surg nurse because that’s a type of nursing that is only done in hospitals. You don’t do med-surg nursing on an outpatient basis – that’s what they call home health care.
Getting back to the past week and the consortium, the only lecture that made me start to feel decidedly overwhelmed was the introduction to surgical instrumentation. There is clearly a LOT to learn.
We’ll get a running start on that education this week because for the next 5 days, the other intern and I will be cleaning, sterilizing, and packaging surgical instruments in Central Sterile Processing. It will be a good experience for us to see another area of the surgical process that is critical and often overlooked, however I’m not looking forward to using the autoclaves. At consortium, when we learned about sterilization and autoclaving materials it was just about the most boring discussion I have ever sat through. Hopefully the real thing will be more captivating.
A Parting Thought: More than anything else that I learned at consortium this past week, I was amazed by a single fact. One bronchoscope – the small telescopic instrument that is used to inspect a person’s airway – costs more than my car. Wow.
