When I was a little girl I wanted to fly around in helicopters when I grew up…

…okay, well not exactly. 

Actually not at all.  It was more like “When I was a little nurse I wanted to fly around in helicopters when I grew up.”

That one is true. 

“Context?” you ask?  

I was sitting in a lecture in nursing school, a class about professionalism or some shit, and they passed out these fliers for different types of nurses.  One of them was “Flight Nurse.”  Hmmmm…fly around in helicopters and scrape people off the pavement after motor vehicle accidents on remote mountain passes?  Sounds fun!  Especially being the “extreme” little lady that I was at the time, all retired “pro snowboarder” and all (are you wondering how many time I am going to use quotation marks in this post yet?  I sure am….)

That is literally how it started. 

My first nursing job after I graduated simply followed in the footsteps of my senior practicum.  Based on a strictly pragmatic decision (namely that I spent my second to last quarter of nursing school abroad and didn’t want to move home, take a senior practicum and have to move again to Tacoma to work at a hospital system that had given my a scholarship for school with the understanding that they owned me for the first 18 months of my nursing career) I wound up in the only available nursing school senior practicum in Tacoma: Neonatal intensive care….NICU…and that, like I said, turned into my first job.

I don’t particularly like babies.  I had never actually even changed a diaper when I started (seriously!).  But I soon realized that babies, especially the premature ones, periodically have to go for rides in helicopters to get to hospitals that can deal with their unfortunate illness or tiny-ness.  SO, maybe this would be a good road to start out down on my way to flight nursing. 

It was. 

And then babies turned into sick kids and sick kids turned into sick kids with heart defects, which is how I ended up traveling around the world and also at Stanford. 

My 6^th nursing birthday is this June (I know, I’m growing up so fast!).  And recently, I felt like I might be ready to take a stab at the whole “ultimate professional goal” thing.  Airlift Northwest, a very reputable flight company affiliated with the University of Washington Medical System was recently hiring peds nurses.  Like me! 

So I applied.

And I interviewed.

And….

(Drum roll please)

I did not get the job. 

And I honestly couldn’t be more relieved about it. 

Moving back to Seattle for my dream job couldn’t be more complicated than it would be right now between finances, relationships, and home leases.  Not to mention the fact that I would like to not to burn bridges at Stanford and have only been there just shy of a year.  And don’t forget that I actually do like it here in California, living in the mountains off the central coast, thirty minutes from surfing, two hours from the city and five hours from climbing in Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. 

In short, I have never been so happy to fail at something that I have always wanted.  But then again I guess I don’t really consider this a failure.  It seems like the kind of thing that I can only become more and more qualified for and that the circumstances of the rest of my life can only become more accommodating of than they are a this moment.   

SO, yay! 

J