Travel Nurses Go For The Gold Every Day!

The 2014 Olympics in Sochi are coming to a close this weekend. Maybe if you’re lucky enough to have worked the evening or night shift you got to catch some of my personal favorite winter sport, Curling — which was on at exclusively odd hours this time around!

Seems so many of us have the Olympics on the brain, and I just came across a great blog this week on allnurses.com called Nurses Train Like Olympians. The posts’ intro reads:

“Before an athlete can enter into the Olympic ring, they must do years of extensive training. The same is true for nurses. They take rigorous prerequisites, nursing courses and clinicals, before they can enter the nursing field. Nurses train to go into many environments. Just like [sic] Olympians take their talents to the slopes, nurses train to take their skills and knowledge into many different arenas. For both there are tears, laughter, joy and few hours of sleep. But they know in the end it will all be worth it because they are following their dream!”

I thought this blog made some really fantastic comparisons. The post goes on to compare nurses and Olympians in terms of:

• Physical Strength
• Mental Toughness
• Uniforms
• Nursing Also Having Fans
• Ability to Keep an Eye on a Goal

Agreed, on all counts! But, it got me thinking about how travel nurses specifically are like Olympians. Here are a couple more I’d add that are specific to travel nurses and how travel nurses are like Olympians:

Performing Like a Champ on an Unfamiliar “Course”

There was some talk this year about difficulty of certain courses in Sochi. Shaun White may have lost some fans over his inability to deal with a tricky course. On the other hand, American Kelly Clark called the halfpipe course “challenging” but told USA Today, “I know I can’t control what the pipe conditions are. It has the potential to be variable, and I’m going to make the most of this opportunity.”

Clark’s sentiments are pretty much what every good travel nurse must believe when jumping into things at a new facility. Travel nurses can’t control or know what the dynamic will be like, but they jump right in and make the most of it.

Sense of Adventure

Watching terrifically talented athletes conquer adventurous courses and dominate the landscape in all the way across the globe totally reminded me Olympians travel for adventure and to succeed in their fields — just like travel nurses.

I hope you enjoy the conclusion of the Sochi Olympics, and that all you travel nurse Olympians keep going for the gold every day on the job!

Oh, the questions nurses get used to hearing!

Talk about a travel assignment: Visiting Bruno Mars in his dressing room to check up on his sore throat. Sounds like a dream assignment, actually. But for one nurse who found herself in this spot recently, she got more then she bargained for when Mars appeared to be a little cuckoo and asked her all kinds of strange questions. Among the strange questions, he asked her to take off her shoes and also why the Pringles can was shaped the way it is! You can check out the video below.

Luckily for this particular nurse, the whole thing turned out to be a prank put on by Bruno Mars and Ellen DeGeneres. But how many crazy questions do you routinely hear on the job that don’t actually turn out to be pranks? Oh, the questions nurses get used to hearing!

Mighty Nurse published a great blog this week called 10 Questions All Nurses Have Learned to Answer.

Some of the questions included:

“So, are you going on to become a doctor?”

“My light has been on for hours! Where have you BEEN?!”

“What’s with the long wait times around here?”

“Have you done this before?”

“Hey, could I call you after I leave here?”

“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever had happen to you here?”

Also, I’d like to share that when I was visiting the Mighty Nurse site I noticed that they had a poll called “How is the staffing at your facility?” At the time I viewed the results, 86% said “understaffed,” 2% said “overstaffed,” and 12% said “correctly staffed.” These results just go to show there is a massive and ever-growing need for travel nurses!

So, back to questions … What questions do you hear all time? And what’s the weirdest thing a patient has ever asked you? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

One thing’s for sure: As traveling nurses, you definitely get to sample different kinds of patients from all across the U.S.