Who You Gonna Call?

I wanna be a nurse! Well, I am a nurse, technically. I'm licensed in 2 states as a registered nurse. I'm just not employed right now. I really miss working as a RN. Nursing is a second career for me. After high school I went to college and was fortunate to have been adopted by a family who could afford to send me to college. I don't think I truly appreciated the magnitude of my good fortune. My Dad strongly encouraged me to study something practical/useful, but I didn't heed his wise advice, and ended up getting a BA in Psychology, and 3 minors, Philosophy, English and Sociology. NOT marketable, but a really fun 4 years. I did listen to him about taking a typing course at least, and earned extra money typing my classmates term papers, and after graduation was aable to find employment in the computer area, and thanks to Dad's wisdom, having a degree, got promoted to supervisory roles. My Natural ability to like language, the English minor, (and 2 years of required Latin) I was able to build a small home medical transcription business.  After my husband died, and our 4 kids were older, I took out loans, and while working full-time (and overtime) at a hospital doing medical transcription, I put myself through nursing school. As a new grad, I took a position as a nusing supervisor at a large facility that was mostly long term care, with a small sub-acute rehab unit. I really enjoyed that job. It was while working there that I met George. After being single for 13 years, I really didn't think I'd ever meet anyone I could really connect with. I was wrong. All 4 kids liked him. He not only liked NASCAR  as much as I did, he was on a pit crew. He lived in another state, over an hour away from me, and for a while, he drove to my house everyday, and I'd see him after work, and on weekends. The facility I worked at was a chain, and I didn't know how much trouble it was in, but I was feeling the effects of the under-staffing, and being asked to work doubles more & more frequently. This was at the same time that I had started to spend weekends at George's house. It was over an hour from my house, which was 45 minutes from where I worked. I didn't want to leave when Sunday's came, sometimes I'd put it off, and had started leaving spare scrubs at George's house and leave really early Mondays and go straight to work from his house house; reallly long commute. Eventually we decided maybe I should look for a position nearer to him. I applied for a license in his state and once that was taken care of, I was astonished to be offered a position as Assistant Director of Nursing at a psych hospital. It seemed too good to be true. Well, it was, and I started looking for something else. I had never worked in an acute care setting, and really wanted that experience. I applied at hospitals near George's house. They all said the same thing; no acute care experience, no longer a new grad, sorry. I ended up contacting the hospital I had worked at while I was in nursing school. I had almost 5 years with them, as a medical transcriptionist, and had also done many of my clinicals there. They did say the same thing, that I wasn't a new grad, and had no acute care experience, but agreed to let me attend some of the new grad program classes. They did expect me to work independently sooner than they expected a new grad to. My schedule was three 12-hour shifts, and I had a 2-hour commute each way. I started in January, and it was a very snowy, stormy winter. I was driving in some terrible conditions, but I knew what I was getting into when I started, and I felt lucky to be given the opportunity. I was spending about $80.00 daily in fuel (needing 4WD most of the time) but to me it was like free education. Nobody up here would give me a chance, and this hospital was training me! I was on a cardiac telemetry step-down unit -- sort of a 'step-down from the intensive care unit'. These patients were really unstable. In my first job I was responsible for running codes - I had had to do CPR, RN pronouncements (announce time of death and do the associated paperwork), decide when people needed to be sent to acute care hospitals, or psych stays, but even though I'd had a lot of responsbility, the fragility of these cardiac patients was intense. I saw my preceptor get shocked because she wasn't paying attention when the doctor said "clear" before he pressed the button for the paddles on a patient who was crashing. She went about a foot in the air.

She was angry. Not just about that. She was much younger than I am. She had gone straight into nursing from high school, it's all she'd ever done. She was really good at it. Even though she probably had about 3 or 4 years experience, it was all in this setting, and she was clearly impatient with me, which made me nervous, which seemed to make her more annoyed, and I felt like she thought I was stupid, and she would ask me questions in front of lots of people and say things like "why don't you know this? You should know this!" I got very self-conscious and was afraid to speak for fear of saying something wrong. Other nurses would come up to me privately and say that she shouldn't be talking to me like that, or treating me the way she was, but nobody had the nerve to say anything directly to her. It all became a huge viscious circle, and ultimately she complained to the unit manager that I "didn't get it" and I really couldn't defend myself that I did, because I was such a jumble of nerves all the time that I really couldn't think. So even though I did learn a lot, I probably actually lost money working there, and my self-esteem took a huge hit. I didn't feel like a nurse. I felt like a fraud. I felt like I had somehow passed the nursing boards by mistake, and doubted if I could be successful anywhere. I left with my tail between my legs, and started looking for a job.

I did find a job, in a non-traditional setting, again as a supervisor. The job involved a lot of traveling, some out of state. My direct supervisor was 2 states away. I was in training, and driving home one night when my son, who lives with us, called to say George was being taken to the hospital by ambulance. We arranged to meet and go to the hospital. There was supposed to be a meeting the next morning at 9am with the out of state higher ups, so I called one of the other suoervisors to let her know that I was on my way to the hospital, and didn't know what was going on yet, but might be late for the meeting. I continued to the hospital. Apparently George had had a major GI hemorrhage. He was unconscious. I was about to be let in to see him and speak to the MD when my phone rang, and it's "Larry" from work, my superior. He just started in -- 'Let me ask you something. Do you want your job? I don't know what's going on with your boyfriend/husband/fiance or whatever the hell he is, but if you want your F%&*$#@ job, you'll be at that meeting tomorrow, ON TIME!'

He continued yelling at me, and I asked his permission to hang up, if I called him back. He said "see that you do" and I went in to see George. George ended up being in the ICU for over a week and needing 8 units of blood. I almost lost him. I did go to the meeting the next day, and made it on time. They asked me what I was going to do the rest of the day, and I said I was going back to the hospital. The next day was my scheduled day off, when I went into work on Friday, they terminated me.

In a way I was relieved. I didn't want to be there. Once George got home, I wanted to be with him. I wanted to keep an eye him. I didn't want to lose him. I didn't want to miss something.

A few months later we were driving to visit a family member, about 3 hours from home, and as we came around a curve, there was a car overturned and lying on its side in the other lane. George had been with me long enough at this point to know he had to stop and let me out, and I keep a bag in the car with me. I grabbed my bag and got out to go to the woman lying near the overturned car, George continued on up the hill, to try to warn approaching traffic that the lane was blocked. I had to crawl across the highway due to the icy conditions. As he got to the crest of the hill, a speeding van lost control on the ice, bounced off the guardrail, and spun into the car, spinning the car into me, and then righting it, on top of me. George slid down the hill, and all that wasn't under the car was my head and one arm. He said I was screaming to get it off me. With help, he was able to lift the car off me, while under his instruction, another man pulled me free. Life flight was called but couldn't take off due to weather. Ambulances arrived, couldn't get up the hill due to ice, stopped to apply chains, and finally arrived for the first victim and me. The first hospital I was taken to said I needed a trauma center, so I was rerouted to a different hospital, and George was called, and arrived before I did. He called my kids, and they came too. I was there quite a while, had surgery, and a blood transfusion, and may have to have more surgery. It's been painful, but I know I'm really lucky.

I don't remember the accident. They stitched up my head. George said my head wound was so deep he could see my skull. Since all my doctors were in the state where the accident happened, I haven't been able to follow up with them. (insurance issues) I finally saw a really great doctor last week. She told me that the type of injury I had would cause memory problems. I told her that was a relief, because I thought I was suffering from what my kids call "Old-Timers Disease".

My dilemma, one of them, is with my lack of confidence already being so profound, it's really scary to contemplate working with any type of memory impairment, and that's if physically I can do the work, and that's if I can convince anyone to hire me, because I'm still facing the same obstacles that hindered my job search even before George got sick, and before I had the accident; no real acute care experience, and I'm not a new grad, so getting the training, and/or experience is a huge hurdle. I've just further complicated the whole situation now. Now I don't know:

• Can I physically do the job of a nurse?
• Is the rap on the head going to make orienting to a new job too difficult/possible?  
• Would I be better off to just accept that I CAN'T be nurse again?
• Is accepting that I can't work as a nurse again really just giving up? I worked really hard to be a nurse, and I love it. I don't want to give up! I'm not sure where unreasonable begins and acceptance ends.

• I don't know who to talk to about any of this....