The thing about becoming a fully functional OR nurse is that the education cannot stop with me.

I cannot stop learning.

I cannot stop teaching.

Today, I cannot stop validating what other people know.

The corporation that I work for has mandatory annual validation of skills.

Every employee has to do online education every year.

Some of the skills must be validated.

Today I am running the Fire Safety and Prevention booth for OR/PACU/ENDO staff.

I am manning the table from 0700-1200.

Although I am a big proponent of being paid every time I work, I am volunteering today.

Why?

Because I will eventually be paid when I turn my clinical ladder in next year.

I can wait for the payoff.

I am patient.

The Call-Preserver: how to be successful at call and get some sleep is the title of my presentation submission for AORN for next year.

I don’t like the submission process.

I am not a brief writer.

I am much funnier in person.

But I believe in my project.

People need to relax on call.

People need to sleep on call.

Neither of which is happening for some people.

I want to help.

I want to be their life-preserver.

Their Call-preserver.

You see what I did there?

I’m not supposed to be working this much.

I’m not.

I should have realized that opening the expansion of the hospital would come with some serious hours attached.

I’m not sure why, though.

I was involved in some of the planning.

I went to the opening day party.

On my lunch break. (The falafel pita was wonderful! More foodtrucks!!!)

And I worked my regular shift.

Plus an 8 hour pediatric life support class.

Plus a 2 hour mandatory education class.

Plus a one hour seminar on staff injury that I chose to watch.

Plus a one hour seminar on leadership roles.

Plus 24 hours of week call (we worked 6 hours).

Plus 48 hours of weekend call (we worked 12).

Plus 4 hour professional nurse council meeting.

Plus evenings has been slammed all week.

No, I’m not really sure how I got to over fifty hours.

Not sure at all.

(facepalm)

And Nurse’s Week bled into Hospital Week which was the same week as the Magnet Site visit for my hospital system.

Being involved as I am in leadership, and Shared Governance, and all around yes-woman, I worked a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean it.

I squired around my hospital’s Magnet appraiser for two days, plus worked my usual shift. As I do.

One day of just my shift.

Two more days of Magnet meetings.

Plus my shift.

Is it any wonder I left on pager at 2100 on Friday night?

Of course I was on call the weekend.

Of course.

And did another 12 hour day and 6 hour day.

I’ve been work hungover all week.

Naps and sleeping late.

Ignoring my work email.

I deserve it.

My class for the quarter is Management and Leadership. As I understand I have to create a strategic plan for a fake business as the major project. I need to read more about what exactly it entails.

I am rather tired of the less than stellar explanations of major papers.

Sigh.

Back to the keyboard and books.

Happy Nurse’s Week. And teacher appreciation week as well.

Wednesday I received a nurse of the year award from my hospital system at a dinner near the mother ship hospital. I was the only one from my hospital.

It was lovely.

My dad was there and watched me get the award. Which was amazing that he was still in town as I’d expected him to go back to California the week before. But he stayed to go to the awards banquet.

I’m not much on people or awards banquets, being introverted and shy. I can tell when I’m overwhelmed, I stand at rest, my hands at the base of my back. There are probably many pictures of me standing like that from Wednesday.

But I am happy I won this award. My husband jokes that we need more wall space. I tell him it’s the third award I’ve received, in eighteen years so I think our walls are safe.

And a very happy nurse’s week to all the nurses who toil.

Who hold their patient’s hands until the end.

Who welcome newborn babies.

Who work hard so that patients and families do not feel the lack.

Who work behind the scenes so that the hospitalization/surgery/chemotherapy goes smoothly.

Kudos to us all.

This is a hard profession.

And we are all here for it all.

If you didn’t get the message I passed my research class.

The same one I got a C on last year.

The same one that knocked me out for four months while I got my act together.

It was a little easier this time because instead of weekly discussion posts there were 4. And five major papers.

But I passed.

This is the same project that I presented to research council last month and the nurse scientist asked if I could get a poster together to present on May 1 at the poster gallery the main hospital is having.

I did not get my poster to the printer in time.

So I will be using printouts and a trifold posterboard.

But it will be done and presented on Wednesday.

I think I’ll go to bed early.

I just turned in the 32 page paper, now with rewrites!

Somehow, even though this class is nominally the same class that I got a C in last year I am doing better?

The teacher says so anyway.

I had no late assignments. I had a bit of a fear mongering when all of a sudden the final proposal was due and I had not turned in the draft. Silly me, there was no draft.

All the remains is the discussion response by Friday.

I hope I pass.

I say this because my mind may have been plotting where to apply if I do not pass. Do I go back to Chamberlain or do I go somewhere else.

I hope this works.

Another person that I carry, as I wend my way through my nursing career, was in reality one of my first patients when I started back in nursing school after I hurt my shoulder and lost my scholarship, and had to leave the college. In my second nursing school, our anatomy lab, which I had to retake because there were no labs offered with my first class, we had a cadaver.

Not really a patient, but a person who had a lot of impact on me as a nurse.

We were only there to learn about the structures of the hand and forearm.

The cadaver, this wonderful person who had given their body to science, to research, so students like myself could learn had am immense and immediate impact on me and my classmates. The cadaver was nude, laid out on a slab in the recesses of the college. The room was dark except for the working lights. The room smelled like formalin. And there were two cadavers, laid out, ready for us.

The face was covered.

We donned gloves and bent our heads to our work.

The flesh was hard and cold and ungiving under our fingers.

We identified the structures as they were laid out for us.

But, I couldn’t help but scan the body, looking for signs of age or infirmity. Of what led to the cadaver death.

This cadaver was a female, of older years, as evidenced by the lack of subcutaneous tissue, of the crepey skin of the torso, of the white pubic hair.

There was evidence of a recent surgical intervention to the left hip. Staples were still intact over the unhealed incision. I imagined I saw surgical pen marks near the incision.

We were not told how or why the cadavers came to be cadavers.

But they contributed to our knowledge base as nursing students.

Now, years later, I can surmise that there was a fractured hip and a repair of the fractured hip and a death. Now, I know that the percentage of people who survive the first year after hip fracture is low. But she helped us learn, when she decided to leave her body to science.

And I am grateful to her.