After decades in OR trenches and administrative offices, I chose travel nursing for the adventure. Your license, a bit of education and some solid experience can get you into nursing positions anywhere you want to go. I've been a traveler for 7 years now and I love it, especially when it teaches me something surprising about my profession, and myself.

Out of my comfort zone
I tend to choose assignments at critical access hospitals with no more than 6 ORs, and I can handle call. But I've occasionally ventured out of my comfort zone. Last year I was at a 15-OR facility, and it worked out. I learned a lot, I liked the people there, and some of them even liked me. So when I was offered a contract at a 20-OR hospital earlier this year, I thought, "How much of a difference can 5 ORs make?"

Let me tell you: it makes a lot of difference. As does the community the hospital serves, the part of town it's located in and whether it has a trauma-level designation. Oh, and did I tell you I signed on for the evening shift? As an education, this was probably "throw you overboard and learn to swim."

To my outpatient surgery readers: It may be a while since you made your bones on nights and call, so let me remind you that even when you're worried about your workflow efficiency, you're still running a perfectly oiled machine in comparison.

I'm at a big-city hospital, which means we're visited by a fair number of "members of the local gun club." I haven't seen this many seriously ill patients in a single hospital in all my years of nursing. And if the EMR system goes down, the night shift has limited access to support staff, who all seem to punch out at the end of the afternoon. (No one's told the IT infrastructure it's allowed to malfunction only during daylight hours.)

Night and day
But there's a bright side, too, in the people who work nights. They're really a different breed. They do their job with what's available to them. They seem to get along and genuinely try to help each other through their shifts. I haven't heard any bickering, backstabbing or arguing whose turn it is to handle the next case. Even the surgeons seem different: They share a laid-back realization that the staff on hand is the staff that's available, and that everyone's doing everything they can to get the job done.

I have to commend the charge nurses, staff nurses, scrub techs and ancillary staff who work evenings and overnights. They deserve far more recognition than is given to them. While day staffers expect things to be at their fingertips on demand, the other 2 shifts are lucky if the things they need are within screaming distance. Evening and night staff make the day shift's call easier, too. They stay on to finish cases instead of waking them up and summoning them in to count, dress wounds and take patients to recovery. If there's an "OR Nurses' Week" and "Surgical Technologists' Week" and so on, why can't there be a week to honor the staffers who are on duty when most of the rest of us aren't?

Whenever I get through a difficult situation, I ask myself what I learned from it. After a month on the evening shift at a large, trauma-designated hospital, I've learned this: If I were given the option again, I'd still choose this shift over the others. Somehow I feel like I fit in with this unique group. And while I didn't aspire to become a better, stronger nurse when I began this assignment, I'd like to think that being part of this facility for even a short time might just deliver that.