Wow… Long Time

Hey everybody,

I just realized how long it has been since I last posted an update on here… almost a year. I am really sorry. Well I moved to El Paso in my last post and started working as an LVN on the 9th floor of William Beaumont Army Medical Center, which is a ICU step down unit dealing with mostly cardiac and medicine cases. I have a lot of fun up here and really enjoy both my co-workers and the type of patients that I deal with. The only bad thing is the chain of command; they sometimes use no common sense lol. The schedule is often mixed up, so they have to make changes to it almost every other day. However when they do change it, they never tell anybody, so unless you come in on you days off to look at it, you might not show up for work when the schedule says you are. Needless to say, I have been yelled at a couple of times until I tell them how friggin retarded they are for not telling me they changed the schedule. Then all they do is apologize lol. It is getting really old. However the good news is the two officers that are in charge of this are both leaving by march, so word! We also run out of supplies a lot and have to go hunting for them throughout the hospital. But Oh well, stuff like this happens everywhere you work. I just have to deal with it. As I learned in Basic Training, Drink Water, and drive on, Hooah!

Well I only have a little more than a year left in the army. I know that I said I was going to stay in when I lived up in Washington, but I realized once I got here that Ft. Sam Houston and Ft. Lewis are the two best duty stations in the army and it is unlikely I will stay there forever. I have decided to get out and live where I wanna live and go where I wanna go. I hate having this 250 mile radius bs and sometimes leave doesn’t get approved. It is just too many limitations of my freedom that I don’t want to have restricted for another 16-25 years of my life.

There were a couple of opportunities where the army asked me to stay and I almost took the bait. Lol. First I received an email from a recruiter at West Point. Apparently, the test that I took to get into the military that tells you what jobs you are qualified to enlist for, I scored really high on it. Every year, the Army asks 200 already enlisted soldiers if they want to go to Westpoint to get a bachelor’s degree and become an officer. However cool that may be, there are no medical degrees at Westpoint, so if I were to go there, the nursing license that I already have would go to waste for the next 8 years that I would have to sign up for, (4 years at school and 4 years required after that as an officer). It just wouldn’t be worth it. Another email that I got was from the special forces. This one wasn’t that big of a deal. Again it was because I had scored so high as the GT Test that they asked me to go through school and training to be a SF Medic. This would get me my paramedic’s license and also be really cool training to have, but there is just too many stressors on the special forces.

In the end, I have made up my mind on what I wanna do. For the next year, I am going to go to school at the El Paso Community College and take classes for pre-requisite courses. After I get out of the army next summer, in a year and 3 months, I have decided to move to College Station, TX, where Maria lives. There I can work at the St. Joseph’s hospital or the College Station Medical Center. I can also apply for the nursing program at A&M university where I can get my Bachelor’s in Nursing (RN) in two years. Plus I will live in the same city as Maria and only 1.5 hours from Mom, Dad and Steven.

I have enjoyed the military and it was good to me, but I am really looking forward to finally being a Civilian out on my own. I promise to keep this more updated from now on, but I gotta go do some laundry and clean, so TTYL for now.

Love ya,
Rob