Resuscitation

Place: Golden, CO
Weather: Cloudy, Foggy
Music: Corelli: Adagio, From Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 8 in G Minor
Mood: Sleepy

I sit here now in my dark little room, resuming an endeavor I abandoned over one year ago. My decision to resurrect this little journal is two-fold. First, I feel like I’m starting a new chapter in my life and I feel some deep, almost visceral, need to document it. If for no other reason than to allow myself to vent, reflect, and someday revisit what it has meant for me to do the things I have done and the profession I have chosen. Second, recent decisions have left me a thousand miles away from most of the people I care about most in this world. I do not take the implications of this lightly, and I hope this will prove a conscious, if somewhat passive, effort to keep in touch. I hope to use this as a tool to communicate, and I hope that it can be a two-way conversation… whatever form that may take in this medium. So, as the days drift along, I will sit down and write my activities, ponderings, frustrations, questions, stories, and whatever else seems to fit the bill. I whole-heartedly invite you to come along with me, participate, converse, and communicate in whatever way you feel moved to do.

For now, I’ll just give a brief update to bring everyone up to speed. Hopefully I’ll be able to fill in some of the details as we go. I’m currently sitting is my bedroom… but the house is not my own. On December 27th, 2008, I arrived in Colorado with my girlfriend, Jamie. Since that day, we have stayed with her Aunt and Uncle here in Golden. Over the past year, Jamie and I have attended (and now graduated from) nursing school here in Denver. After passing my national boards in January 2010, I have recently been hired by a local hospital to work in their Emergency Department (ED) as an RN. My first day was March first, and my first official day in the ED was March 7th. There is a lot to talk about there, and I’ll come back to that in the next post to explain in much more detail. Jamie’s still job hunting, and the market in Denver right now is quite poor… even for nurses, believe it or not. Hospitals are reluctant to hire new-graduate nurses because they require additional resources to train and orient to their new profession. Long story short, it is much cheaper for them to utilize part-time staff, float nurses, and nurses coming out of retirement than put in all of that effort (read money) to properly train the next generation of nurses. So, a significant portion of my classmates are currently highly qualified and unemployed, which is a shame when, truly, hospitals could use a few extra extremely capable hands.

I think this will be it for tonight… more to come soon. I’m excited to be at this again, and I hope you’ll hold me accountable to keep this updated regularly. That accountability is best in the form of encouragement and participation, and I hope to hear from you all soon.

-Reed