Pretirement

After 7 years in the Emergency Department at Harbor-UCLA, a Level I Trauma Center is South Los Angeles, I have pretired.

Pretirement is a lot like retirement, except it comes earlier and you fully intend to go back to work again... when you run low on money. 

I loved my job. LOVED it. And walking away from it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. So hard, I stalled it for 6 months so I could get my head around the idea of saying goodbye.

When I started my career as a nurse, I didn't know what to expect. I hated nursing in nursing school, and I wasn't sure I'd like it as a profession. Turns out, it is the best thing I've ever done, and I don't think that would have been the case if I hadn't landed at a county facility serving the uninsured. 

I loved the people I worked with, the patients we cared for, the uncertainty that rolled through the door, the smell of the firefighters' overalls, the lingo on the radio calls, the glued-together building that we worked in. I found my voice and my backbone, and standing up for someone who can't stand up for themselves became an everyday event, some classier than others. I got to do all sorts of amazing things as a nurse at Harbor, things that made me tough and things that made me cry. And laugh, oh there was never a shortage of things to make you laugh.

Disaster Training! What a disaster!

Thanksgiving with the Harbor Fam. We knew how to potluck.

In a place where people die, you've got to make the merry sometimes.

Easter egg hunts made everyone a kid again. Bad to be a patient in that 30 minutes.

Legends. Absolute legends. I was so lucky to work with them.

Less legends. But such a highlight of every day.

Helipad adventures

Everybody loves St. Patricks Day. Even the Russians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Nigerians, South Africans, Brazilians, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, and every other countryperson represented in our nursing staff.

Search and Rescue Training. I basically killed all the dummies. That's why it's called training,

Visit to the LA County Morgue. For, y'know, inspiration.

MICN Class. Literally thought my head would explode during that course.

Trauma Survivor Celebration. Without a doubt, my favorite extra credit work. 

I got to make friends from co-workers, celebrate their birthdays, weddings and new babies, support them to higher degrees, watch them fall into love and their first homes. We defiled party buses, celebrated any season we could justify, pulled off adult field days, white water rafted, camped, skied, tubed, and even traipsed through Europe. This dysfunctional family I was a part of is the reason I lasted all the years I did. 

Field Day! 

Work wouldn't give us a Christmas party so we gave ourselves one.

Lots of people died on the Kern River the year we did this. None of us!

At least one of us knew how to put up a tent. 

Birthday on the beach. 

Letting a couple doctors in on our good times. 

The Harbor Hoedown!

Babies! And since this, two more babies!

Playing in the snow became an annual thing. 

The gang does Germany. And Austria. And France. 

So much like family that Shana became a stand-in chicken mommy when we left. 

That place absolutely shaped who I am, and after seven years, I can say with confidence that I am pretiring a damn good nurse. I am smarter, kinder, better, more aware, and stronger than I planned to be. And even though my heart broke when I walked away, it was time. 

A couple months of perspective has really brought to light the toll that sustained intensity like that of my job can take.  It necessarily should have a short life or it will cost you some of yours. A typical day in the emergency department has huge swings from high to low, which can make you an impatient, detached, compartmentalized person as a means of self-preservation. Factor in the dysfunction and cripple of a pandemic, well, human beings aren't made to do things like that as a career. A month or six if it's real desperate, sure, but a career? Nah.

Pretirement is a welcome change. A slow, boring, empty change. It's got its own sweet torture, where every day feels like Sunday. Inconsequential things like if the hermit crab will show up out front become extremely important parts of the day. I am burdened by how many chicks the hens are having and tossing bread that costs $7 a loaf out to them in the morning. I spend an inordinate amount of focus on hydrating. I brush my hair once a week. A trip to the grocery store makes me need a drink. I've made huge improvements in my crossword game. I did a very complicated paint by number. Having only impulsive things to do has brought peace, and that peace has saved me from a chronic distress that I didn't even know I'd developed. Every nurse in the world deserves a pretirement phase after the Coronavirus shit we've been through.

I miss my job. I miss my work fam. But pretirement is just what the doctor ordered.