BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, GUYS!

I've been sitting on some big news for a couple of weeks and am really excited to finally let y'all know. I'M MOVING TO NEW YORK! Yes, that's for realsies. My friend Amanda is just as insane as I am and we're both going. We got jobs in Queens as travel nurses to help out in the emergency room of a hospital in an area very affected by COVID. I'm not moving there permanently, just for a couple of months.

This is me with my friend Amanda. We're different in most ways, but one similarity is that we are both up for crazy adventures.

It has taken me a very, very long time to find out what I'm passionate enough about to spend 40+ hours a week on it. Somewhere during my 2 years of studying for my ASN, I was thinking about my strengths and how to apply them to my career. I thought back on my life and realized that one of my strengths is that I feel very loyal to and protective of the people that I work/study alongside with. On top of that, I know that one of my strengths is taking action when I see a need. I feel like this was pretty evident during my time in the ASN program at UVU. I put in extra time working as the president of the Student Nurse Association at UVU because I felt like there were some gaps that I could help fill in taking care of the students in the program. I also put in time as a member of the board of the Utah SNA for the same reason. And lastly, if anyone knows anything about me from the last 10 years working in health care, they know that one of the things that I'm the MOST anxious to resolve in the nursing profession is having safe patient ratios. Besides being unsafe for the patients, having unsafe patient ratios takes a toll on nurses. Nursing burnout is NOT a real thing. I've heard it called moral injury, and I believe that in my core. Here's a video about "moral injury" if you want to know more about that: https://youtu.be/L_1PNZdHq6Q. If you don't believe me, you should start looking at suicide rates of health care professionals, which are significantly higher than in the rest of the population. It's honestly a tragedy. Sorry, let me get off my soap box.

At my pinning ceremony (nursing graduation ceremony), I looked around at my classmates and felt so lucky that I got to spend 2 years with them. As much as I'm glad to be out of the ASN program and onto other things, I miss all of those funny, kind, generous, and WICKED SMART friends of mine. At the pinning ceremony, I promised myself that I would work hard to make nursing a better profession for them.

When I started to hear about COVID, the thing that caught my attention the most was the fact that healthcare professionals are breaking under the pressure. An unrest started churning deep inside me. That unrest reached a boiling point, and I decided that I can't just sit here in Utah and wait for the pandemic to reach us. There are nurses who are drowning in work, who leave work broken every day and go right back the next day, because they are needed, and they are willing. I want to help people recover from COVID, but mostly I want to help my community of nurses. Those wonderful people who put so much into taking care of others need to be taken care of right now.

So I'm going. I'll be there by the 20th!