Right after Christmas of 2017, I accepted my first travel assignment. I considered jobs in Washington, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Ney York, and California without much follow through. I was wanting to travel, but the idea of moving thousands of miles away had me leery. I knew I wanted to do it, but I was hesitant to pull the trigger and accept a job. But I finally did it. I took a travel assignment 65 miles away from where I live.
I talked to a lot of travel nurses about what they wish they had known when they were baby travel nurses. I took a lot of questions to my friend Alana. I went to her for a menagerie of reasons. Alana is the most skilled nurse that I have ever met. I once saw her build a miniature blanket fort for an elderly woman who had an altered level of consciousness. This little old lady would not keep still or keep her gown and brief on. “Oh, Nana,” Alana would say. “We gotta keep you covered up.” Alana kept this patient’s dignity intact when the patient was unable to do it herself.
She has been a professional traveler by choice for many years. Hospitals fight over this nurse. Her skillset is unmatched. So, I went to her with the most specific question I could come up with: “Ummmm, what should I do?” Alana advised me to pick an assignment that was in the state where I lived. “That way, if you hate it and everything sucks, you can still see your friends,” she opined.
That’s what I did. I started looking in Oregon. I had some job offers in Clackamas (a couple hours from where I am) and one in Prineville. Prineville interested me because it was near Bend—which is a lovely town full of delicious food and beer to kill myself with—but it was in the heart of winter. “There will be snow everywhere,” Alana cautioned. Her family is in that area, so she knows it well. She is also a native Coloradoan, so snow doesn’t scare her like it does me.
One evening I am sleeping through a fever–delirious and uncomfortable–when my cellphone rings. The manager of the Salem ER had read my profile provided by my travel company and she wanted to offer me a job. Febrile and dehydrated, I said yes to everything she said. She asked if I had ever traveled before and I said no. She then walked me through questions that I’d want to ask managers when receiving calls from them. She did the work for me in that conversation. I just laid there trying not to talk about how I was interviewing for a job while wearing only my day-sweat Ninja Turtle boxers*.
After accepting the job, I sprung up and wrote out my letter of resignation and emailed it with an hour left in the day. It was done. I celebrated with a La Croix. It was a pamplemousse. Yeah, I know how to get down.
What I know about Salem is that there is a statue of man made of gold on top of their capital building. It’s a statue of the Jeff Bridges character from Tucker: The Man and His Dream. I visited it once as a kid. I’ve driven passed it a few times as an adult, but that’s it. In talking to coworkers, I heard two things about the Salem ER. “That’s the busiest ER in the state!” they’d say with their first breath and then follow with, “I loved when I worked there!” Their ER is much larger than the one I’m used to.
I start this job in 24 hours. I bought scrubs to match their dress code. I ordered undershirts with long sleeves to cover my tattoos. “Our community is a bit more… um… conservative than yours, and our feedback from the community is that they want tattoos covered,” the manager told me. That’s fair. I’m competent enough to save their dying child’s life but they don’t want to see my RoboCop and comic book tattoos while I do it. That would be too much.
I’ll let you randos know how it goes. Or I’ll stop doing this forever.
*–These boxers were given to me by a coworker when I was in nursing school. I had told her how I forgot to pack underwear when I was traveling for nursing school, so she bought me a few pairs that would round out any manchild’s underwear drawer. She gave me a Batman pair, a Superman pair, and two Ninja Turtles pairs (one with all four and the other with just Raphael aka the best turtle).
Transient Nurse Boy 