By Julie Benn, NurseZone contributor
The allure of Alaska
has taken many travel nurses to the northland. Never mind the below-freezing
temperatures, extremes in daylight time and icy roads—RN Linda Ruebsamen is one who is
taking it all in and loving every minute of it as she fulfills her 13-week
assignment as a traveling nurse in this land of natural wonder and beauty.
As a
traveler with NurseChoice, a quick-start, short-term health care staffing
company, Ruebsamen,
52, is following her dream of travel and adventure, sans her husband of 27
years (at least for this trip!). “I’m getting flowers and cards galore from
him,” laughed Ruebsamen.
“He’s home alone with two dogs and he is ready for me to come home and take him
with me on my next travel assignment.”
This, of course, is exactly what she plans to do. “The kids
are through college, and we are still young and healthy enough to live life to
its fullest, and that includes traveling adventures.”
Next stop: possibly New Mexico, then San Diego or Hawaii,
depending on where the winds of travel nursing take her. But for now, she is
working hard at Providence Medial Center
in Anchorage,
two-and-a-half miles from where she temporarily resides. Linda works nights in
the ICU.
Although she has worked staff positions, Ruebsamen said she has
always been a travel nurse at heart. “I don’t have to worry about politics or
staff meetings—it’s great. I can just come in and do my job.”
She has seen many changes in agency work and nursing in general
over the years. “Agency nurses used to be called ‘rent-a-nurse’ by the
staffers. But that was 25 years ago. Now that they know we are coming in to
work the holidays and the shifts they want to have off they are a lot more
welcoming nowadays.”
She also remembers the days when she worked at a Catholic
hospital and the nuns would measure their dresses to make sure they weren’t too
short. “It was truly the days of Florence Nightingale—we even had to wear the
white hats.”
But a lot of that has changed and Linda can now be found in
pants and scrubs as she keeps up with the changes in medicine, both with
fashion and with patient care. Ever learning and ready to help, Linda got her
start in her career as a nurse aid in a nursing home. Her supervisor encouraged
her to get her LPN, which she did all while working and taking care of kids
with her husband. “I had to knuckle down for a year. I was 27 and up to that
point had only worked odd jobs as a waitress and then a nurses aid.”
All the while Ruebsamen was not just learning in school, but learning in
life as she readily volunteered to help in any department that needed her.
“After a while they would hunt me down. I took a three-month tour of duty in
the same hospital, working med surge, radiology, ICU and cath lab to name a few
departments.”
On the day after she graduated with her RN, Linda was
welcomed back with open arms to the same hospital where she had worked
previously as an LPN in Missouri.
Today she is very pleased with her location and her agency.
“NurseChoice has really bent over backwards for me. I was going in blind and
they took care of everything. I got here on a Friday and started work on a
Monday, so I took the weekend roaming around town, finding the shortest way to
drive to the hospital, and just checking things out. It was really nice to have
those days as a leeway. It’s a very good way to start an adventure.”