As a civilian nurse I worked in a Level Two Trauma Center before my deployment. I was a trauma emergency room nurse. Now, I work in the recovery room. When I came home from Iraq, I was burned out on trauma. I saw enough trauma to last a lifetime. It simply took too much emotion out of me. Luckily, my superiors understood and valued the work I do. I’m doing OK in the recovery room.

What frustrated me when I returned was the type of patients we take care of back in the States. They are mostly older people with chronic problems. I really miss the deployment mission and trauma care we provided. It really became what I want to continue to do. I would go back in a heartbeat! Back in the States, nurses are tasked with doing everything. We are providing care for patients. We are sounding boards and therapists for families. We are pulled in so many directions. On deployment, you didn’t have other responsibilities clouding the mission.

At my stateside hospital, they usually preferred returning nurses to ease back into nursing roles and avoid trauma units for a time. They believed this way, we could acclimate to a non-deployment atmosphere and provide nursing care to patients in a more routine environment. However, this did not prove true for all of us. I thrived in the deployment environment and found stateside care at my hospital boring and not challenging at all.

Getting reassigned to Guam was a refreshing change of scenery, even though it is an isolated island. I had to start from scratch getting to know a new staff, but it was a welcomed positive change. It was just what I needed after being deployed to a war zone. Afghanistan needed to “move to my rearview mirror,” if you know what I mean. I wanted to put the Afghanistan experience behind me, and meet new challenges at a new location. The hospital in Guam was a new beginning.

On the Reserve side, we don’t get much downtime when we return from a deployment. I went back to my job as a trauma ICU nurse, and I just couldn’t handle it. I was able to switch to a med–surg ICU at my hospital. I had tried to work in the Level 1 trauma ICU, and we got patients with gunshots, motor vehicle accidents, and I started having flashbacks. You start thinking about that last patient you transported on the helicopter, and you wonder if he made it. Then, you think about the stuff that is still happening over there, and you need to be back there to help them, and you’re not. But you know that when you were there you did well, you were helpful, and you know it was rewarding, even though it was a very hard job.

Well, it wasn’t very rewarding in the civilian ICU where I worked. It was not the same caring for a drunk driver, or a gang member who shot up some people, or a drug dealer. It was different. The ones I cared for overseas were shot serving their country. The people in my civilian ICU were usually there because of bad circumstances that they brought unto themselves, a lot of criminal activity. I gave it a try, but I just had to get out of the trauma ICU. I transferred to the medical–surgical ICU.

I found myself to be a very good listener. Colleagues would come to me with their problems. They said I had a gentle, unassuming way with people. I also related well to my patients and heard their concerns about their future. After serving in Iraq, I am interested in the mental aspects of war and I can see myself getting a master’s in psychiatric nursing to better understand PTSD, compassion fatigue, and burnout. I saw firsthand the toll the war took on my patients, my peers, and some of the physicians, especially the folks who had done more than two tours of duty. I believe my niche would be as a mental health nurse practitioner or as a clinical nurse specialist in the long run. I definitely want to stay in the army and get advanced education.

Being busy was both good and bad. I love my work and I love patient care and forming relationships with my panel of patients and that’s why I love being an NP [nurse practitioner]. There was a benefit to that. But it did take away time from being with my family. Having that ‘end date’ in sight was very helpful because when I separated from active duty, my plan was to take a year just to be a stay-at-home mom with my girls. We all knew that was the plan. In terms of patient care, I really loved seeing active duty patients. So, when I saw someone who had recently returned from deployment, I would try to engage them by asking, “Where did you deploy? What was your experience with that?” And sometimes I’d say to myself [laughing], “Am I that therapist who starts talking about myself?” So, I would say I was there, and often we would end up having a short conversation about where we had deployed to and what our roles had been and how we were doing coming back. I take longer with my patients anyway. I’m always running behind, and they don’t mind that. I would be 20 to 30 minutes with a patient. I’d often feel that we were both better off after the short conversation. We had that brief opportunity to share.