Lighting Out for the Territory

I've waited for a long time, as a fantasy since 2009, and as a real goal since September 2014, for tomorrow. Following my daughter's practice, I'm laying out my outfit, planning my lunch, and carefully packing my backpack with books and supplies. The damn thing weighs more than the Alexandria Library. I spent today printing out syllabuses, carefully three-hole punching them and putting them into a three-ring binder. Not exactly a trapper keeper, but close enough. I will invite Sofie to decorate it with emojis, her current sticker of choice.

I've been reading syllabuses, book chapters we'll cover this week, getting my first pair of scrubs hemmed to the length of my stubby Gimli-length legs, and watching videos about such matters as critical thinking and time management. I am trying very hard to set my preconceptions to zero. Does critical thinking mean something different in nursing than it did in literary theory, software documentation, or arguing who deserves election into the Baseball Hall of Fame? In theory, probably not. But in reality, I expect it takes directions I've never seen before. I'll let you know. 😀 As for time management, I once learned that if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. It will take the least amount of time necessary. Ask someone with an empty schedule, and you won't see it checked off the task list until after Elvis returns.

I suspect that in particular, my new teachers will specifically target social media, perhaps the greatest snare of wasted time that's ever been invented. I am vulnerable to its wiles and I shall resist. I'd like to write one paragraph a day for this blog while I'm in school, but I doubt I will. Of course, once I post, I neurotically check back to see who liked and commented. This must end. The other social media risk for health care workers, of course, is strict protections of privacy. We must learn to practice omerta, adopt a code of silence that would make a taciturn mafiosa seem like a talk show host.

I had hoped to write a post before I started about how my education prepared me for this moment. I'll provide a condensed version here. I'm a pretty introspective fellow, both a blessing and a curse. As I've mentioned, I left working in tech under a cloud. My thoughts have gone from the bleak to the delusional before I found a balance and figured out my path. On bad days, I thought that I'd wasted the expensive education my parents sweated to provide by going into nursing, which doesn't require nearly as broad an education as I've pursued. I've finally come to understand that in part that education--more the process than the product--trained me to be adaptive, imaginative, self-reflective, and observant. In terms more current today, I have a gained a rubric for a personal SWOT analysis. My father used to tell me that I could do anything I wanted to do if I worked hard enough. I don't think toil worthy of Sisyphus could possibly have made me an astronaut or a major league first baseman. On the other hand, it does now look like it's true that any schmuck can grow up to be the president of the US, but that's not the subject for this blog. Nursing is within my scope; reading the syllabuses and seeing the amount of writing involved in the training, I've spotted my edge, that little bit of well-developed skill that'll save me a ton of time compared to many of my classmates. I hope I can help them too, as we're no longer competing, but cooperating. Or so we were told in our first meeting back in November.

Ten years, twenty years, thirty years ago I could not have imagined what I'm about to do. Self-doubt alone would have closed the door before I'd even peeked through it. I went in the door at Microsoft and Amazon; that door closed, a window did open, and I got my ass kicked through it. I landed on the sidewalk, took a deep breath of salty Seattle air, and after grieving the end of my career,  set off on a new adventure that offers more possibilities for the rest of my life than I ever anticipated.

I'll close tonight by quoting my two favorite philosophers: Calvin and Hobbes.

It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy. Let's go exploring.

"There's no joy in it for you."

Marc Maron's podcast (wtfpod.com) changed my life. In the Summer of 2014, during successive weeks he interviewed father and son filmmakers Ivan and Jason Reitman. Ivan is famous for Ghostbusters, Stripes, and Meatballs among his dozens of credits on IMDB. His son Jason most famously directed Up in the Air and Juno.

In Summer 2014, I was on leave from my job at Amazon. It's no secret among my friends that I have clinical depression. I lapsed into a depression in the prior fall and winter, culminating in my departure. It became evident that I no longer wanted to be technical writer, which is pretty much at the bottom of the hierarchy in most software organizations. At the time, I aspired to remake myself professionally. I was studying business intelligence and other data oriented technologies. Throughout the summer, however, Megan had been encouraging me to pursue the nursing career I'd investigated in 2009 before we decided that Megan would obtain health care training first. I resisted because I'd long given up on the idea because I thought I was simply too old to do it. 

I spent my time after leaving Amazon studying SQL and other database matters, walking my daughter Sofie back and forth to school, cooking for the family, and performing other assorted chores. We own a rental house across the street from us that had landscaping I'd neglected pretty much since we moved out of the house in 2005. I'm not sure why, but one day in August, I decided it was time to clean up that yard. I spent weeks in the sun pulling plants, putting down mulch, digging up pavement stones, and re-establishing the flower beds. It was very pleasurable. The weather was gorgeous and I enjoyed the manual dimension of the work. Much better exercise than going to the gym. 

I listened to podcasts continually, catching up on Maron's among others. Maron gets his guests to talk about pivotal moments in their lives. He asked Ivan Reitman about his son's decision to follow him into film making. Reitman told the story of Jason coming home from medical school during a vacation. It was clear to Jason's parents that he was unhappy. Ivan said to Jason that he and his mother thought he'd make a very fine physician and would be proud of him, but they could see "there's no joy in it for you."  The next week, Jason told Maron the same story, this time from the son's perspective. The repetition precipitated reverberations in my thoughts.

I'd been daydreaming about working in health care for a long time. I was reading books about epidemiology and other aspects of health for years, regretting that I chosen to study literature instead of something in health care or life sciences. By 2009, it was clear that technical writing for me was a dead end job, but like a lot of people, I continued to work in it because, it paid well, didn't involve breathing coal dust, or standing hip deep in manure, and did have genuine moments of satisfaction. These moments became fewer and further between and as I rode up the job ladder. I refused to admit to myself what became more evident every day: I was f***ing miserable.  At the same time, an eventual transition to nursing seemed incredibly daunting. There were 50 credits of prerequisites ahead of me before I even could apply to nursing school, for example. 

Megan had been encouraging me to start taking prerequisites all summer long. Other friends, I'd come to learn, thought my plan to go back into tech as a BI analyst was dead on arrival. In short, there was no joy in it for me. One friend said that it would simply put me back into another isolated cube working for organizations I couldn't care less about. Megan pushed me harder. "Just register for one class and see if you like it." I replied, "Of course I'll like it, I love being in school. It's the only thing I do well." The negativity from the depression comprised a substantial barrier of entry.

"There's no joy in it for you." Hearing that podcast was like hearing the voice of God telling me to take a bigger risk than I ever had, to surprise myself with a new direction. To find the joy in work that had long been missing. I'm not naive. There'll be organizational unpleasantness; there will be difficult patients. But at day's end, I'll know that I moved the needle of the universe a bit more toward compassion and empathy. Or at least that I'll die having tried. 

Into the Family Business

Some people grow up in a house full of musicians and grow into great musicians themselves. Athletes beget athletes and many offspring go into the family business, whether it's owning gas stations, or selling plumbing parts wholesale.* I grew up in a virtual infirmary. As a diabetic, my Mom's monitoring of her health was paramount. We all were acutely aware that she was a couple missed insulin shots away from a meeting with the guy with the scythe. As she aged, the medical dimension of our lives became more complex and by the time she passed away in 2000, the infirmary was virtual no more. Her oxygen saturation dropped to the point where she required oxygen. My father ran nightly peritoneal dialysis treatments, which made it ironic that he eventually spent ten years on dialysis himself. Last, Mom's cardiac bypass surgery had resulted in blindness when she had strokes during the operation that atrophied her optic nerves.

There are certainly people who might have developed an aversion to the medical industrial complex after such exposure. I, on the other hand, became increasingly fascinated whenever I witnessed my parents' treatment in hospitals. After her bypass surgery, Mom stayed unconscious for several days. In her room in the cardiac intensive care unit, she seemed to be the engine driving the machines around her, as if the computers in The Matrix were prototyping their designs.

As his kidney disease developed, my father starting racking up medical frequent flyer miles as well. Shortly before he moved to California, I flew back to Springfield, MA to be with him when a surgeon formed the first fistula in his arm (a tough merging of veins designed to keep them from collapsing from the large needles necessary for dialysis). Once he moved to California, my sister Marilyn became the primary witness to his care, becoming its overseer as his medical conditions worsened and compounded with each other. In the several years before his death, I flew to see him, both in the hospital and out. Each time I marveled, as I did with my Mom, how medical advances granted him additional years. Dad squeezed an extra ten years out of body that kept trying to throw in the towel. Unlike my Mom, he got to know all of his grandchildren and see both of his sons happily married. (Mom was at Marilyn's wedding, a true gift for everyone present, despite the difficulties in travel she encountered due to her medical tribulations.)

Everywhere, there were nurses. I saw them work way more than I saw doctors. Nurses had jobs that combined acute technical dexterity with tasks as mundane as weekly housekeeping. They moved with purpose and efficiency. I marveled at their ability to do things I thought myself utterly incapable of. Little did I know, but my fascination with their work nurtured a growing, though unconscious, urge to join them.

* I always thought that if my family had a crest, our motto would be, "I can get that for you wholesale." Three of my grandmother's siblings (or their spouses) started businesses that still exist. I know offspring still run at least two.

Lives at Stake

I haven’t been posting regularly. I’m trying to write something punchy and cogent. That takes time. If I’m going to get this blog going, I have to write fast and not worry about writing well. I’m going to shoot for one paragraph a day. Here goes.

People ask me all the time why I’ve decided to switch to nursing. Here’s what I tell them. I got tired of working to add a few pennies to the fortunes of people who already have billions. There was a time when I was proud and happy to work in the tech industry, but returns were diminishing. Among the other ways of articulating my impulse to change can be expressed another way. If people are going to demand I work as if lives were at stake, then goddammit, there really should be lives at stake.

Cheers, Merry, and Happy, 

Brett

Welcome to Seeking New Superpower

Greetings!

Welcome to my new blog. I've created this blog to document my transition from a career in technical documentation and content publishing in the software industry to nursing in health care. Mainly, I'd like to answer the question that most people ask me: Why do you want to leave the tech industry and become a nurse. It's a long story and I'll try to tell the short version and keep you up with notable experiences as I go through nursing school.

Background:

• I graduated from Bowdoin College in 1987 with a major in English. From 1989 to 1995, I earned a Ph. D. in English at the University of Washington and could not climb the wall into a career as an academic. 
• From 1997 to 2014, I worked at Microsoft, a startup in Pioneer Square, Microsoft again, and Amazon, always writing technical documentation (aka "content") or managing writing teams. This career, like most things, had a half life for me that ended in April 2014. On the advice of my attorney, I don't say much about that. 
• In September 2014, I started taking prerequisites for nursing school at North Seattle College. I really enjoyed the classes and embraced my new path with eagerness. Classes included a couple quarters of anatomy and physiology, one of microbiology, a quarter each of general and organic chemistry, statistics, some psychology classes, and nutrition. 
• In September 2015, I started to applying to local four year colleges' nursing programs. I did not get admitted to any, although I was waitlisted at one and was #1 on the waiting list when school started this fall. 
• In November I finally gained admission to Shoreline Community College's nursing program. School lasts six quarters and I'll finish with an RN and an Associate's degree in nursing. I'll have collected the whole set: associates, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. 
• I have ambitions to continue my nursing education beyond the RN, but that will come after working as a clinical nurse for a year or two. 
• I am currently 51 years old and am entering a profession I never would have imagined myself pursuing 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. 

Questions and comments are certainly welcome. I've learned a lot on the journey thus far, made big mistakes, and at times been humbled when I was most arrogant and obnoxious.

As for the blog's title, it's a reference to the fact that I've discovered that my superpower is unblocking clogged toilets. Given the corporeal infelicities of a career in nursing, I thought being a toilet whisperer is a good place to start.

#houseswitholdplumbing