Where It All Started

Hey everyone,

I wanted to give you all a little history about myself and to share why I have a desire to help educate current and future nurses and surgical techs about the operating room. When I first graduated high school, I had a desire to pursue a degree in teaching. I initially thought that I wanted to spend my life teaching elementary school children. While I did believe this career path would have been rewarding in certain aspects, soon after my first year of college, I began to have second thoughts about this as a long-term career path.

I had been working part time at a local animal shelter while going to school for early childhood education. After working there for about a year, bringing many animals home to foster, bottle feed, or adopt, I came across an ad that one of the local veterinarians was seeking to hire a vet tech. While I had little experience at the time in the medical field, I thought the opportunity would be interesting and a look at a possible other career path. I actually already had a pretty good rapport with the office manager of this particular veterinarian clinic due to collaborating with them regularly through the animal shelter. Long story short, I ended up starting my new career path as a vet tech after an '“on the go” interview which consisted of riding in my soon-to-be office managers truck to go pick up a clients dogs from his truck as he went to the hospital and ended up being admitted leaving his pets in alone in his truck.

I spent several years working as a vet tech. I really enjoyed the small group of colleagues I worked with, and who wouldn’t enjoy having their patients being cats and dogs? More specifically, puppies and kittens! I gained a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge working at the vet clinic. I was frequently tasked with giving vaccines, assisting with checkups, drawing labs, setting up with surgery and getting to help when needed in a procedure. Among just about anything else you can think of.

A vet tech is not only the nurse of the vet clinic, but the surg tech, rad tech, phlebotomist, CNA, lab worker and much more. This is where my love for surgery really started to take hold. I enjoyed becoming more comfortable with medicine, calculating drug dosages, and being involved with the surgical procedures.

While I enjoyed this career very much, there were some downsides. Financially, working as a vet tech was not going to be the most providing career. While monetary reasons are not why we should always pick our careers, it is helpful when your career does financially compensate you well and has benefits that will reward you in retirement. I had begun to view my career as a vet tech as a stepping stone for my next career move.

So, what was the next step going to be? I had taken a pause from college during my time working at the vet clinic and now began to look back at programs to see what my options were. I initially distanced myself from nursing. I will admit now that this was mainly due to me not fully understanding what options there are for a nurse. I was closed-minded and thought there was only one type of job for a nurse, and, boy, was I wrong. When I explained to my career coach at the community college that I was not interested in nursing, he lightly suggested surgical technology (more on that in a future blog). This intrigued me since what I enjoyed most in my current career, beside the fact I worked with dogs and cats, was working in surgery. I expressed my interests in the program and had a meeting the next day, which happened to be my birthday, with the program director. Before I knew it I was enrolled in the surgical technology program. 

I was very fortunate that the veterinarian who owned the vet clinic was extremely supportive of me returning the school and guaranteed me employment at the vet clinic until graduation. I continued to work at the veterinarian clinic around my academic schedule until I completed my AAS in Surgical Technology. Before graduation I got several jobs offers at local hospitals.

The two main offers I considered were for a position on the general team and the other was for a cardiovascular team. The general team was at a hospital that was about a five-minute drive for me, and the cardio position was about fifty minutes away. Initially, I was really considering cardiovascular, but ultimately decided on the general surgery position simply because it was closer to my home. I think this actually wound up being the best choice for me as I have uncovered a deeper passion for surgery and truly enjoy the other nurses and surg techs on my team as well as (most) of the surgeons I work with.

The variety of cases we routinely perform provided me with a lot of learning opportunities. I continued working as a surg tech for several years on the general team, but I found myself wanting more responsibility in my career and more advancement opportunities. My husband would frequently bring up a nursing degree to me while I was thinking about my next career advancement. Again, I will admit that I was hesitant as I didn’t want to leave my comfort zone and a career that I had come to love. However, I soon began to look at it as a broadening of my knowledge and not as though I would be leaving surgery.

My first thought was to return to my local community college and obtain my associates in nursing where I would then move towards an online bridge program. After speaking with a career coach, luckily not the same one I told I had no interest in nursing, I was told that it would take me another three to four years to obtain my associates degree. The program required me to become a CNA and then wait until I was accepted into the nursing program after another year.

I was bummed that the experience I had as a surg tech didn’t earn me some credit, but it is what it is. I signed up for the CNA program and was put on the waitlist, as it was already full. I realized that it was going to take even longer to become a nurse after this. The same day my husband and I discussed looking into the local universities nursing program. I ended up applying thinking that there was no way I would be accepted.

Not long after applying they reached out and soon, I was enrolled to start the nursing program the next semester. Plus, they took my academic and work history into consideration and reduced the required classes for the program. I continued working part time during nursing school, as I did through the surg tech program. My husband and I also had our first child four months before beginning nursing school. It was quite the task to juggle a newborn, nursing school, and still work part time.

I will say that I felt fortunate with my past work experience both as a surg tech and at the vet clinic, which helped me tremendously academically. Since I already had completed my AAS in Surgical Technology, I was able to shave a little over a year of classes from my schedule. This also helped since during the summer break before my final semester of nursing school, my husband and I had our second child. After graduating nursing school, I returned full time to the general team which I had been working with for several years.

Now working as both a nurse and a scrub, I am very flexible within the department. I still love scrubbing cases, but I enjoy the change in pace between the different roles I can fill. I have also enjoyed teaching and onboarding new hires at our hospital. I am usually utilized as one of the training nurses/scrubs, as I am currently the only dual nurses/scrub our hospital has.

Shortly after graduating from nursing school, my husband and I began contemplating returning for graduate school. I really didn’t know what or if I would want to return to school again. I, like most people in a similar position, began looking at CRNA and NP programs. I believe both careers would be rewarding and challenging but was a little hesitant. I looked heavily into both careers and will talk about why I didn’t pursue these routes in a future post.

My husband began suggesting the idea of pursuing an MBA with a focus in Healthcare Management. While I was not eager to pursue this path initially, my husband and I did discuss how this path would broaden my knowledge and education outside of clinical areas of healthcare. I have since been accepted into an MBA program with a focus in Healthcare Management and, in our normal fashion, just recently gave birth to our third (and last) child. I can’t tell you how many people have told me “You know you can go to school without having a baby, right?”

I will be done with my MBA in December of 2022 and, while I do not know what my next career move will be, I have observed there is a disconnect and or misunderstanding of what the roles are of the surg techs and nurses who work in the OR. I am here to help shed some light on the job duties surrounding surgery and possibly encourage some of you to join your surgery team. I hope at the very least that you learn something new from me and you can teach me something in return. 

Welcome to Mrs. Circulator!