A New Job for a New Year

Once upon a time, I had ambitions to become a professional writer. This dream was partly inspired by my admiration for Jo March in Little Women. I took a few English classes in high school and soon came to the decision that making my living off of the written word was not the best plan for my future. Obviously that was a good decision, considering that I can't even keep up with this one silly little blog. I'll keep trying though, if I have any readers left after my 6-month silence.

The career path I chose after giving up on writing has kept me pretty busy lately. Shortly after our "real" honeymoon, I started a job at the brand-new Seton Medical Center Harker Heights. This hospital caused a bit of a sensation here in Bell county, since there's not much diversity in healthcare options. My first job as a nurse 5 years ago was at Seton's main location in Austin. I loved it there, so was very excited when they began building a location in Harker Heights, about 25 minutes away from Temple. In nursing school, my senior year preceptorship was in a Level 1 trauma center emergency department in downtown Dayton, Ohio. That first taste of emergency medicine never got out of my system, and I've been wanting to gain some ER experience ever since. However, my desire to travel has kept me doing floor nursing for the past 5 years, alternating between cardiac/telemetry and medical/surgical. When I first interviewed at Seton Harker Heights, I really wanted to get a job in the ER. Since I didn't have any previous experience, they advised me to get a job on med/surg, and then transfer to the ER after the hospital had been up and running for a few months. So that's what I did. I started working on med/surg in June, and by August I was cross-training in the ER and loving it. After several emails back and forth with the ER director and HR department, and months of waiting for a day shift position to open up, I finally got to transfer full-time! I started in January, and it was a great way to begin the new year. I'm the first nurse they've hired who doesn't have previous ER experience, so they're giving me a longer orientation, providing education material to help me learn more about emergency nursing, and setting up days for me to shadow in ICU and Respiratory Therapy. I had been starting to feel a little stagnant doing floor nursing, and it has been so refreshing to learn new things! Here are some highlights of my new job:

* Every day is different. You never know who is going to walk in the door, or be rolled in on a stretcher. It can be slow and quiet for a few hours, and then in a matter of minutes every room in the department is full - including the waiting room. Definitely keeps you on your toes. Boredom? What's that?
* Teamwork. Everyone in the department seems to work really well together, and helps each other out. I can be busy with a more complicated patient for awhile, and then come out of the room to find that a coworker has given meds to another of my patients, or done the paperwork on someone who I needed to discharge. My new coworkers are also very encouraging, and explain things to me whenever I have questions or need help.
* I'm getting lots of practice starting IV's and drawing blood.
* Lunch! One of the nurses starts her shift at 11 AM, and relieves everyone else for their lunch breaks before she takes her own patients. This is a fabulous system. Too many nurses in the world skip meals.
* In general, I've been enjoying working in a smaller hospital. It feels more like a family than a big machine. Walking through the halls, I know or at least recognize almost everyone I pass by - nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, pharmacy techs, chaplains, phlebotomists... and they recognize me. Actually, they've come to recognize the sound of my shoes. My comfy Dansko clogs are so loud, it's ridiculous. It's kind of embarrassing to walk up to the nurses station and overhear someone say "what is that sound?!" And someone else says, without even turning around to see if it's me, "Oh, it's just Ruth's squeaky shoes." Oh well - I'm too stubborn to buy new shoes. I'm not going through the hassle of breaking in a new pair!

A downside to my new job is all the germs that have attacked my poor little immune system. It's common for a nurse to get sick a lot during her first year in the ER, and apparently I am no exception. I've been sniffling, sneezing, and coughing for pretty much a month straight. I've consumed a ridiculous amount of cough drops and vitamin C, and I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that I'm finally on the mend.

I'll try to be a better blogger after this. No promises, though. I was going to make a new-year resolution to blog at least once a month, but I can't even do that since I missed January. Oh well. Instead, my 2013 resolution is to become the best emergency room nurse that I can be. And to read Les Miserables.

The Honeymoon before the Honeymoon

Well, averaging about one blog post a month seems to be the best I can do right now. Sometimes it's hard to find time to write about your life when you're busy living it.

Anyway...as I said in my last post, Pat and I had to postpone our Florida honeymoon until June due to school and work. However, we were able to go on a "mini-honeymoon" for a few days after the wedding in March. After all our friends and family pelted us with birdseed, we stopped by our apartment, shook the birdseed our of our hair, grabbed our bags, and hopped in the car to drive to San Antonio for the weekend. We stayed in a hotel on the River Walk, took a riverboat tour, ate at yummy restaurants, walked around town, and went to the movies to see Hunger Games. It was a fun way to spend the first few days of our marriage. Here are the pictures I took:

Riverboat Tour

That's our hotel on the right

Mariachi bands serenading people at restaurants by the river

Pretty mosaic we passed by on the riverboat

 I loved all the tall trees with big roots right by the water

 Tall building

 Freaky faces on the tall building

 Of course we went to the Alamo! I had never been before.

We saw some wildlife...like this owl...

...and this family of ducks...

 ...and Pat's new friend, the Jackalope.

 Pretty waterfalls at HemisFair Park

 I'm pretty sure this used to be a door leading to Narnia

 Tower of the Americas

View from the top of the tower

 

The end! 

Or should I say, the beginning? 

No, the beginning was the wedding. I'll get to wedding pictures next month, maybe. :-)

Blue water and white sand

Well, it's about time for my belated post about our belated honeymoon. Recent events have kept me out of the blogging world...but I finally uploaded some pictures. Months ago, when Pat and I first started planning our wedding, I asked him where we should go for our honeymoon. His reply: "Somewhere with white sands and blue water! Where we can fly to in a plane." Pat had never been to the beach before, or been on an airplane, so we decided on Destin, Florida. Since school wasn't out yet in March, when we got married, we postponed our "real" honeymoon until June. It was actually kind of nice, to have the busyness of the wedding behind us, and to have had a couple of months together to get settled into married life, and then get to go on a relaxing vacation. We had a fabulous time....although, it didn't start out so great. I got food poisoning or something the night before we left, and was up til about 1 am being very sick. Then we had to get up at 4 or 5 to make our insanely early flight out of Austin. But no worries, it all turned out fine.

Pat's first flight!!!

He might have been a little nervous, and I a little queasy, but it was still fun.

It was something of a relief to arrive at our hotel on Okaloosa Island in the middle of a very beautiful day. We got unpacked and headed down to the beach.

Blue water...

...and white sand

The next few days were just wonderful.

Our sandcastle was truly an architectural wonder. And everyone else on the beach loved it! When we make sandcastles back home at Belton Lake, all the drunk idiots eagerly run up and smash it the second we finish. But in Florida, we told kids on the beach to have fun and play with it when we were done, but nobody would touch it. A little boy said "Oh no, I wouldn't want to mess it up," while other people walked by and took pictures.

We might have gotten a little too much sun.

Snorkeling off the Emerald Coast

We saw this fenced-off sea turtle nest while walking on the beach one night.

We took lots of walks on the beach at sunset.

And one morning, we got up early to see the sunrise and read our Bibles together on the beach.

All in all, it was a wonderful honeymoon. 

I love being married!