My first job was at a nursing home. I lasted three days!

I hated that job. It was an awful job.

Within a couple of weeks I was hired at Kaiser Permanente down in Fontana California. I worked as a float nurse, and also in the intensive care unit.

Why nursing? I don’t think I ever seriously considered anything else. I like the science of it and I like the communication. I really like talking with people about important stuff. I wanted a job where I felt like I was an important part of someone’s life at an intimate moment.

My grandmother was an unlicensed nurse. She gave me books, some of which I still have, and she told me stories. My grandmother lived with us for part of my childhood. She and I also shared a bedroom.

She and I would talk about nursing, and much, much more. She was important in my life; she brought a lot of visionary thinking into my life. She was imaginative, and a good influence. It was great to have this from both mom and from nana.

I Move From the ER to IT

I started working in the emergency room at Dominican Hospital in January of 1986. Now, I work at Catholic Healthcare West or CHW. I liked working in the ER until I didn’t like working there anymore. It might have been age or it might have been burnout, but for me it seems that there were more and more layers of expectations without any staff adjustment.

What really frightened me was that the staffing was such that I was afraid that I would have a patient that would die, and I wouldn’t know it. Somehow if I knew they were dying, that would be better. That’s got to be why it bothered me.

We had a great team on the night shift. We had a steady group that worked for many years together. It was well worth being up in the middle of the night. That was my favorite time.

There were some bad ones too.

I’ll never forget a radio call on December 30, 1988. There was little girl who was drowned in a bathtub by someone who had been sexually assaulting her. Now, this guy has just come up for parole again. He’s the oldest living person in the youth authority.

Things like that are just beyond words awful. I thought I might quit nursing at that point. I just didn’t think I could do it anymore. She was blond, and she looked the same age as my daughters.

I have really good memories of working in the emergency room, and I’m glad I got out when I did.

Now, I’m doing computer implementation of an electronic charting system at CHW hospitals. We develop, train, do gap analyses, and that kind of stuff. We’re creating the face for this computer implementation and I like the people part a lot. I know a lot more about computers than I ever did before.

When I used to work in the ER, one of my friends, Donna, went to work in case management and I followed her. I liked case management; it was nice and restful, but ten years from now the job will be exactly the same. I started getting restless!

Donna had taken the same job a year before but I didn’t want to. Abby was still at home. But I talked to Donna more and more, and one day the job came open again. Now, Abby was gone.

I sat down and thought hard. I thought about where the money was going. I thought about where I could work where I would feel valued and my ideas would be accepted. So I joined the computer generation. Information technology has the biggest money behind it, and a lot of these changes are government – mandated.

It’s a big change but I feel lucky. I’m working longer than I ever worked in case management. There’s no “off” switch. I find myself dreaming about the job.