The Traveling Kind

It's that time again!! The pants ants are in full force and I've accepted my next assignment!! We've got about three weeks left here and it's going to fly by. We'll be filling our days off meeting up with old friends we haven't seen yet and two concerts: Kenny Rogers and Lyle Lovett with Emmylou Harris!! I'll wait and let y'all scream with excitement------- Speaking of live music, for our next assignment we'll be in AUSTIN !!! I'm not so thrilled about being there in the dead of summer but the fall will be nice. If the pants ants stay away we'll be there through the holidays, so far it'll be through the end of October. We'll see how that goes. We can't wait to get to Texas and be living in the city where so many of our friends are! I'm excited to do all of the fun touristy Austin things we've never done before (Franklin's get in mah belleh!). PLUS, I'll be working in the PICU at Dell Children's which is a job...

Ryan and I are officially settled in our new city. We've really lucked out in the weather department so far, I'm hoping it stays that way till January 2nd. Fingers crossed. Everyone here seems to think it's going to get really cold. Haven't they heard about El Nino!? :) Oh. My. Goodness. The move in to Chicago was probably the easiest in my 3 year travel experience. I've started going through a new travel agency and our housing comes fully furnished down to the silverware-without any extra cost to me! If we really wanted to make it easy on ourselves we could've just traveled with our dogs and our suitcases and been just fine. Going with this new company has definitely been a learning curve. I'll cover the pros and cons of large/small travel agencies in another post. I'm definitely likin' the way things are going so far,  but my momma didn't raise no dummy so I'm cautiously optimistic. We spent our first two days here getting to know our a...

It's been awhile since I've posted anything travel nurse related. I get asked about orientation a lot so I figured I could probably squeeze out a couple of paragraphs about it for the curious. HOSPITAL ORIENTATIONS This assignment is my ninth one. I've worked in 9 different hospitals including Scott and White and I've had to do orientation at each one. They've ranged from a half a day to an entire work week long and that's just for general orientation and computer charting classes.  After general hospital orientation, at most, we get three days of on-unit orientation with a preceptor. Most experienced nurses who sign on staff in a PICU get EIGHT WEEKS. That is a lot of info in a very short amount of time.  So. much. info...so. little. time. There are not huge differences in patient care throughout the different hospitals. Learning the new policies is generally pretty easy, like how to draw blood from a central line or central line dressing c...