How/why did you choose to leave your nursing career in favor of a Mommy career?
I started working in high risk maternity right out of college. Sometimes the conditions were near ICU intensity and many of the experienced nurses on the floor didn't think new grads belonged there. My preceptor told me that was her opinion my first day on the hospital floor. There is an expression in the field, "nurses eat their young". That unit certainly fit the expression. Many of the new grads left after six months or, at most, a year. It was an absolutely brutal learning experience and I had all the signs of depression (not that I recognized it at the time, I just thought it was hard work to learn). I loved the patients. I loved that we were so often able to reach happy outcomes. I realized early in my clinical rotations that caring for those with chronic illness was not for me and, even if they get sick, no mom stays pregnant forever! So... I stuck it out and learned and earned a bit of respect from that cranky crew. After three years, my husband and I decided we wanted to start a family (years of discussion) and that we wanted to do that on the west coast because he'd always wanted to live there. So, we left Connecticut, separately.
On my way driving cross country, I stopped in Las Vegas and received training to become a Legal Nurse Consultant. I liked the idea of being able to work from home and use my nursing knowledge to quickly interpret a legal record for an attorney. I also wanted to have a clinical job to keep up my skills, so I made an appointment with a home health nursing agency. The day I accepted the job as a home health nurse, I had a positive pregnancy test. Woo hoo, that was fast! I liked home health nursing and meeting some true characters as patients, but I wasn't passionate about it. Pursuing the legal nursing was a constant undercurrent with minimal success. I worked as a home health nurse until the day before my son was born and then did phone triage from home on weekends for about a year afterwards. I finally got a consistent legal client at about the same time and spent four years doing his occasional cases from home (closed that business a few months ago). Again, it wasn't a passion and it had become quite clear that parenting my spunky kiddo was!
So... long answer to "how" I left nursing and as for why...
High risk maternity was, eventually, wonderful for me, but it is not available outside of large centers and requires hours that would take me away from my son.
Home health nursing and legal nursing were pleasant, but never provided me the same kinds of great joy.
I adore the parenting process and have no desire to enter the current medical system as a practitioner. I could write for hours about all the wonderful aspects of parenting... and, voila! That's what this blog is mostly about :)
If you had to throw away either your TV or your computer, which would you choose?
It's only recently that we've actually started to use the TV again after an eight year break (and just as a screen for Wii / DVDs). My husband and I found that the time we spent in front of the TV wasn't worth the cost in either money or time. So, I'd definitely chuck the TV first. We could go back to watching DVDs on the computer and the Wii's value doesn't even compare to the wonders of having the resource of the internet at my fingertips. There are so many times when my son asks a question that Google yields the answer with fascinating pictures and details to boot!
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