Jennifer Olin, BSN, RN, has never been able to stay away from the media. In fact, after graduating college with a dual degree in journalism and English, she headed off to a small town in Texas to work on a small-town newspaper.
The dream lasted about a year. “It was the mid-1980s in Texas,” Olin says. “Things were not good.” After being victimized by a down economy and last-hired first-fired seniority hurdles, Olin says she wrangled freelance work and subsequent newspaper jobs for years before breaking into television news as a font runner.
She then moved into producer’s roles in San Antonio, Seattle and Houston, between which stops she learned to be a travel agent. The final straw came when the news program she had traveled to Houston to produce was canceled three months after it had begun.
“I had left New York, which I loved, and a man whom I thought I loved,” Olin says. “I called my parents and started hyperventilating on the phone.”
After reading every career-change book she could get her hands on, Olin said her father helped her set up a day to shadow different kinds of nurses. By the end of it, she knew she’d found her niche. TV was fun, she said, but “incredibly superficial.” Whether the anxiety had awakened something within her or she was maturing into a more adult mindset, she says, the environment no longer gave her what she sought.
“I needed to do something that made a difference,” Olin said. “I had never felt like that before.”
So she accepted a night job in corporate travel with American Express, and began taking classes toward her BSN at Texas Woman’s University. If her path to the health care field had been anything other than circuitous, it was comprehensive.
“Nursing made me feel like I earned my place somewhere,” Olin said. “I never thought I’d change the world as a journalist, but I thought I might tell somebody something that would make them want to change it. Nursing gave me that back.”
Olin says she was happiest in her career as a travel nurse. Between 2004 and 2010, she worked at 12 hospitals, with her longest assignment being two years in New Hampshire. She says traveling lent her perspective and an understanding that enhanced her sense of what it meant to work in the nursing profession.
As Olin went from place to place, she would try to absorb a little of how things were done in each new location—both good and bad examples—and brought it with her to the next assignment.
“Every time someone said ‘you can’t do that,’ I would learn something and take it with me to the next place,” Olin says.
“It is really amazing how close-minded we become—among issues of sterility, patient safety, patients who don’t have any control over themselves—and yet there are still 1,000 ways you can drape the microscope safely and sterilely,” she says.
Yet even when Olin thought she’d settled in as an OR nurse at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas, her journalism life started to creep back into the picture. One day, an old friend told her, “I just saw this job you’d be perfect for. They’re looking for a nurse with writing skills…”
That was all it took to reignite the restless and adventuresome spark at her core. The pair spent all night rewriting Olin’s resume, and she landed the position. She even managed to convince her supervisors at MD Anderson to retain her services as a per-diem nurse. For nearly a year now, she’s been both a full-time writer (at rncentral.com/blog) and a part-time nurse, and says the experience has been eye opening.
“Writing for the electronic media, it’s been a very steep learning curve, and I’m getting better at it,” Olin says. “The other nurses are terribly supportive. They all think it’s very cool.”
The only thing that’s different now, Olin says, is that as a per-diem nurse, she spends fewer hours onsite, which handicaps her ability to quickly locate specific inventory on the fly. In the spirit of true camaraderie, Olin says, her coworkers all make fun of her disorientation.
“I’ve been an OR nurse for 12 years,” she says. “I love OR nurses. They are difficult and demanding, and then we go behind the closed double doors and nobody comes out.”
Writing the column has not only given her the chance to sharpen her writing chops, Olin says, it’s also given her a refresher on nursing fundamentals. On a hot day in Houston, she can dig up info on heat stroke and exhaustion. A hard case at Anderson might inspire another column.
When her colleagues hear that she’s working on this or the other thing, they float her tips as well. Her significant other is a physician, and her best friend from nursing school is a nurse manager in a cardiac unit, so she’s got no shortage of story ideas.
Nursing provides such a wide range of specialization that informs a breadth of perspectives from a variety of people, Olin says. From child rearing to weekend hobbies, she says, what you get, overall, from talking to nurses is the idea that care giving can be reflected in a variety of ways.
“I think the great thing about nursing, about getting a nursing degree, is that a lot of it is how to think,” Olin says. “If you know how to think, you can do just about anything.”
