Education :
- Capital University, 4 year degree
- National Board exam to be certified
 I perform the circulating nurse and scrub nurse roles in the operating room for orthopedic surgery. I can do all kinds of surgery, but I prefer to be assigned to the orthopedic ones. My days are really busy cleaning and setting up rooms for surgery, assisting with surgery and then cleaning up again for the next case. With a nursing degree, you can go just about anywhere in medicine. I chose surgery and this particular type of surgery because there is a rapid change in technology. The many changes keep the job interesting for me.
The best part of my job is the people I work with. I really enjoy the team we have here at Mount Carmel East. They are a fun group to work with, are very supportive and work well as a team. Probably the worst part of the job is being on call. You never know when you are going to get paged or what the issue will be. That can be stressful for a number of reasons.
Some of the cases that we work on are very interesting and can be very exciting. It has also been very exciting this past year working with COSI to produce the Surgical Suite program. I really enjoy sharing what we do on a daily basis with live videoconference audiences from around the country. It can be a lot of fun interacting with the student audiences for those programs.
 The past five years has seen a real shortage of nurses and that shortage is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Many nurses are retiring and others are getting out of the profession. There is a real need for new nurses to enter the profession. Nurses are already pretty specialized in what they do, so there probably won’t be too much change in the level of specialization over the next few years. I look forward to a time when there are more nurses available and there isn’t such a shortage of qualified people.
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