gainfully employed

Quite the delay in blogging for the past 8 weeks, but that’s because we have been busy (kinda) doing what I am going to blog about…working!! After all we are here for David’s fancy Stanford job so let me fill you in a little but.

– DAVID: the living legende

David started work almost immediately after we moved here back in July. He is working as a Post-Doctoral Scholar (the official title) at the Hagey Lab doing plastic surgery research at Stanford. Im not in the lab, so I don’t completely understand is this was a given or chosen by David nickname, but the spot above his desk reads, “The Living Legende”. That’s my husband everyone.

Working at the lab!

How exactly do you do plastic surgery research? Well, I wish I could say that he was giving tiny mice tiny boob jobs, but he is actually doing something much more, eh shall we say advanced and meaningful. In the lab they harvest fat cells from recent liposuction procedures and use the fat stem cells to do all sorts of cool things. Like turn into bone cells and repair a broken mouse leg or jaw. Think back to the last time you took a general science lab class. Now imagine David spending 10 + hours per day making microscope slides, plating different fat cells, and doing microsurgery on mice.

Microscope Man!

Surgeon at work!

So far, David has really enjoyed the work. It helps to be working with awesome people and we have meet some good friends through the lab. While they work hard, the schedule is still much more relaxed than compared with residency and David can go out to lunch with his co-workers, be home for dinner with me, and have some fun out of lab time on the weekend.

Being at Stanford this year has been fun, we have explored the campus and cheered on their football team. The campus is really different from other colleges I have been do because it is so spread out, they have a lot of space and every courtyard is lined with bricks leaving you feeling like you are walking through Spain or the square in Florence, Italy. Oh, and there are palm trees everywhere.

Palm Trees on a College Campus?

Is Dad ready yet?!?!

-MEGAN: mizzou super nurse living it up in California

For the move out here I took a Travel RN job. No this does not mean that I am traveling all over now, just that I “traveled” from Kentucky to California to fill a temporary hole at a hospital. This means I still have a Kentucky drivers license and pay Kentucky income tax. But while I am away working I also get a housing and meal stipend. I was placed at a Kaiser Permanente in Redwood City in their Neuro ICU for 13 weeks. Hard to believed I am in week #12 already, time flies!

Nursing in California is very different than anywhere else. First, the nurses here are unionized which means there are a TON of rules everyone has to follow regarding staffing and work conditions. My nursing friends from elsewhere will find this hilarious but in addition to each nurse only have 1 or 2 patients in the ICU, there is a dedicated charge nurse, relief nurse, resource nurse, and RRT nurse. Sometimes there are as many nurses in the unit without patients are there are those with assignments. It’s a little extreme, and while it is nice to have extra hands to turn or walk patients, it really seems to me like everyone is sitting around without much to do. The other thing that’s nuts is the break schedule. No more shifts where you skip lunch or your nursing colleagues sticks a straw in a coke can and holds it through the curtain into the room where you are working so you have keep your blood sugar above 10. Nope, everyone gets 1 hour and 15 minutes worth of breaks in a 12 hour day. They are serious about their breaks, someone comes and gets report on your patient and will be completely responsible for them while you are away. Meaning the nurse on break is free to leave the hospital, go out to lunch, take a nap, whatever you fancy! I still have a hard time with this, I really don’t like to be away from my patients for one hour at a time and I still remember my first job where I would eat lunch in front of the monitors and could abandon my turkey sandwich if something went bad and a patient needed me. Not here, if you try and come back from break early, you will get sent back to the break home to ensure you took your full 75 minutes.

The other thing that makes nursing here different is that the nurses are predominately Filipino. Apparent this is a norm for California and sometimes when I am at work I am the only Caucasian nurse there. While I haven’t learned any Filipino words, I have sampled almost all of there dishes and types of food. It’s a carry in every day with everyone making their lunch ‘family style’. The break room is filled with all different kinds of Filipino favorites, I prefer their dessert dishes but the seafood noodles aren’t bad either.

While my contract comes to an end I am looking for more permanent job opportunities. While in route to California I graduated from NP school and have since taken and based boards so I am looking for a Family Nurse Practitioner job but nothing has come up yet. So what I will be doing a week and a half from now is a mystery, if I am unemployed you can expect a blog post daily. But I have faith that something will come along!