Becoming a Travel Nurse

Becoming a travel nurse was not my first choice in my career path as a nurse. In fact, it wasn't even a concept I considered was possible when I first started out. I had my sights set high in the sky to become a flight nurse and knew exactly what I needed to do to get there; I had my plan all mapped out.

The first few years of my career I followed my plan diligently. I did two years on a general medical surgical floor and got a solid foundation of basic skills. I moved up to a cardiac step-down unit for two more years and was exposed to more medications, sicker patients, and learning when to call a provider early to intervene before things went south with a patient. Finally, I made my way up to the medical ICU and started settling in, anxiously excited every day to go to work and keep learning.

After going through a major life plot twist in the summer of 2021, I chose to continue to pursue my dreams and move back to the Mayo Clinic in their Cardiovascular Surgery and Transplant ICU. Coincidentally enough, I had done a fly-along with a flight nurse who had worked on that floor for his experience and I knew I was headed in the right direction. I met the flight team down at Mayo and they told me to stick my heels in, learn everything I could, and that they would happily hire me when I was ready to apply. I stuck to everything I could in that ICU, even buying critical care books to read more in depth at home about what I was doing at work. I finally felt satisfied with my career and where I was headed; I was so close to the end point.

Enter: real life; and the changes to healthcare that came out of the backside of the pandemic. The largest problem being short staffed. I could suddenly feel the effects of that and was faced with patient assignments that truly weren't safe. I suddenly became afraid for my license on a few nights the summer of 2022 and I started thinking that maybe I didn't want to fly and I didn't want to stick around in these work conditions. Or I certainly wasn't getting paid enough to take on more demands with less help. Coming to that realization in itself took a huge amount of courage for me as I thought I was doing something wrong by possibly deviating from my plan and suddenly feeling as though I had no control over my career and how things would shape up to be. I felt so lost and that I was letting people down because I was trying to prove a point to them that I could do the hard thing by working in one of the sickest ICUs in the country. So I started thinking.

I reached out to a friend who was a travel nurse on my unit that I had previously worked with in the medical ICU and she told me a bit about traveling; I was intrigued. I looked into Per Diem work locally with a travel agency and got my feet wet. The first few shifts were quite rough, as you truly are thrown into a completely unfamiliar environment and expected to take care of the patients with little to no guidance. I stuck to my basics; vitals, assessments and medications, and watching for things to awry. I worked at a few different facilities and really loved the flexibility of getting to choose when I worked, and getting paid a decent chunk of change for it. I looked further into doing travel full-time and considered my options going forward.

Not quite ready to take the full plunge and just up and leave Minnesota altogether, I chose to take a full travel contract in Minneapolis. I made the most money I ever had in my life in those 13 weeks, but it did not come without quite a few sacrifices. I was in downtown Minneapolis which is an incredibly unsafe area; we were put on lock-down several times throughout my contract due to drive-by shootings in the ER. I worked 48 hours a week, night shift, every week. I was tired, always. My days off were barely that. I rested enough to be able to go back and do it all over again. It's a miracle I managed to keep up with my gym schedule and meal-prepping. The patient load was also the toughest I've ever had. Being in float pool, I worked from 7-11pm on one floor with 4 patients. I then had to hand-off those patients and go to another floor from 11pm-7am and take on a 6 patient load. Although generally not very sick, handling that many patients in one shift has the potential for mistakes to happen. When my last week came and the supervisor asked me to extend, I politely declined but couldn't get out of there fast enough. I thought, if this is what travel nursing is, I don't want to do this either.

After having a better travel experience in Duluth later on, I finally took the plunge to go out of state and really travel. As of right now, I've been in Idaho about two months and absolutely love it out here. The mountains and National Parks were a huge draw for me and I've done quite a bit of venturing out already. I'm glad I chose to stick with traveling even after a debatable first experience. The flexibility of choosing when to work and where to work is a huge perk for me. Not to sugar coat the entire experience, it still is a challenge some days and there's always a risk of losing my job tomorrow. In this instance, the reward outweighs the risk I'm willing to take. I'm not sure what's next for my career. But for now, I'm going to keep traveling until the universe shows me where to go next. And that's good enough for me.