July 15, 2018

Three hours of sleep

...and  maybe not even that.  That's all I'm running on for work tonight.  So I'm firing up the coffee pot and starting the IV.  Oh well.  It looks like I'll be working with a couple of my favorite nurses, so it'll be all right.  A great team can make up for a lot of things, lack of sleep included.

I'm almost done with the reading for the first class.  I have 92% of the tasks completed.  Two more tasks remain, then I have officially covered everything and I can begin the assessment.  Well, I could start the assessment at any time, but like I said, I want to get the most out of this experience so--at least for right now--I'm going through everything.

Graduate school has started me thinking about my career's future.  I really like where I work, but I'm not sure there will be a lot of opportunities for a MSN-Ed there (I also feel like there's some new undercurrents developing that I'm not sure about, but that's another story).  But anyway, I would like to stay at my current facility and if that's not possible, there may be opportunities for a MSN-Ed in one of the other hospitals in the organization's chain.  If not, I may have to look elsewhere.

Fortunately, in the several years I've been living in the area, I have at least one contact in almost every psych healthcare facility in town.  While that doesn't guarantee me a quick new job, at least I have people who can do recon for me and, should it come to job application time, provide a reference.  And we could always relocate out of state...though that's not on my want-to-do list in the foreseeable future.  That was part of the plan of going to education full-time later on in life.

Of course, who's to say a nursing program won't pick me up after I graduate?  Though I had planned to be a full-time educator later on, after I've been worn out at the bedside, I could always go full-time educator sooner than planned and continue being at the bedside part-time/PRN.  But that's at least 1.5-2 years off.

While I'm thinking about the future, I'm trying not to obsess over it too much.  I've been trying to practice the mindfulness I've been learning about, to stay in the present and be aware of what's going on around me right here and now.   No easy task given my anxiety issues and predilection to stressing out.