Well, I’ve not done one of these for a while now. In fact, I can’t remember the last one I did. And I find that is completely normal. After all, the not so stated plan for a PhD program is to remake you. It just might take a little longer.
In the beginning I was so energized and full of zeal to learn. What a difference three years makes. I am still energized about learning. I am still zealed (?!?) to learn about research.
Here comes the big but.
If I followed my learning timeline of what classes and when I was supposed to graduate at the beginning of May 2025.
Spoiler alert, I did not graduate in May 2025.
All of the core classes are completed. My pilot study has been completed. I even presented a poster based on the pilot study in April at the AORN convention and I am slated to present virtually at the hospital system research symposium in the beginning of June. I am also responsible for a virtual symposium presentation in November.
Yes, all based on the same research from the pilot. The last two are podium presentations where I have to actually talk to people. Maybe there will be a podium, if not I will pretend.
All of these different presentations, the poster and the podiums, is known as dissemination. Getting the information that I’ve worked very hard on for over a year out to the public. Well, other healthcare professionals.
Instead I had the most challenging health year of my life. Getting older is not for sissies. Midlife crap threw me for a loop. We don’t talk about that enough as women and I am so excited that perimenopause and menopause talk has entered the conversation in the mainstream. Perimenopause can cause a host of problems and I had most of them. Cutting to the quick of it, it certainly made my life hell in the last year and certainly knocked me for a loop. But that is a blog post for another time. And not the core reason my school plans got knocked a little awry.
That not so lovely reason is the 2024 election.
And the crap fall out from that.
Suddenly research was under even more stress, if not outright attacks from the people who find it more profitable to pretend not believe in it.
And then the attacks on the institutions who have massively contributed to our modern way of life through their research began.
Every day it felt like there was another strike.
And another.
And another.
I felt as if I had to bear witness to it all because someone has to be paying attention.
It was exhausting. Kind of like never ending bullshit torture akin to what I think being waterboarded feels like. Except it is shit decisions that have set the research community back many years. So many years.
All I could do was hold on and not give into the numbness that this crap is supposed to engender in people. Because that is their endgame.
I felt like we were thigh deep slogging through shit.
And then something flipped the mental switch.
I went from mad at the situation and the relentless attacks on research, on institutions to mad that they were making me doubt my path.
So what if research is a skeleton of what it used to be? I will be part of the resistance.
So what it publication is under attack and will no longer be the same. I will continue to write these dispatches.
So what if teaching jobs and professorships and colleges and programs and universities are retrenching their program offerings and job listings. I will continue to teach as I have, in small settings like the Call Bootcamp I run for new to the hospital nurses.
Because we are at war.
This is the “watch me” mad that fueled much of my other academic endeavors.
They think that they can make me stop? Through their pretend shock and awe campaign against the American people and institutions? Though unending waves of nonsense and threats and more threats?
It was a bad idea to make me mad to the “watch me” level.
Watch me resist this crap. Because I believe in science. I believe in research. I believe that colleges and universities. I believe in love. I believe that people have to right to own who they are. I believe in LGBTQIA+ rights. I believe that people have the right to read whatever they want to read, to watch whatever they want to watch. I believe that people are not pawns for the establishment.
You want me to fail because I am older? You want me to fail because I am a woman and that makes little men feel bad?
Fuck that.
Watch me succeed.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 