Life in the OR with Sonya Spruill
Meet Sonya
I was born and raised in Walterboro, South Carolina. I was told that at the age of three, I told my family that I wanted to be a nurse. After high school, I attended college for two years at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where I thought I wanted to major in Industrial Psychology. Somehow, nursing was not on my compass at the time and I took a different path.
I left Spelman and came home to hold various jobs. I became a career administrative assistant for various industries, such as financial (working for CFO, Controller, Credit Manager) and legal (assistant for corporate bankruptcy, immigration, school education, and environmental lawyers). When presented with the opportunity to attend law school, I decided then that, although I liked what I did, it was not what I truly wanted to pursue for a career.
I decided to go back to school at Trident Technical College in 2003. I finished with my ADN in 2006. I had begun as a Student Tech on 8D during my last year at Trident but I had always been interested in the OR so I decided to take a job in the Main Operating Room as a new grad. I started in 2006 and since then, I have become the Unit Magnet Champion, RNIII, Selecting Talent Peer Interviewer, member of the OR Shared Governance Council, CNOR, and Unit Certification Champion. I became a mid-shift staff nurse where I was exposed to multiple services: Urology, GYN, DaVinci, ENT/Plastics/Oral, Ortho, Neuro and Pediatrics. This gave me a wealth of knowledge and I became a resource and mentor to many.
I decided to go back to school in 2014 to receive my BSN, which I received from University of Texas – Arlington in December 2016. I also received my MSN program in Nurse Education there in 2018. I am one of the Nursing Professional Development Specialists for the ORs at a large academic medical center, where I am the lead for orientation/onboarding for 50 ORs.
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Intro/Outro:
Welcome to Don't Eat Your Young: A Nursing Podcast, with your host, Beth Quaas. Before we get started, we have a few quick notes. Don't Eat Your Young is a listener supported podcast. To learn more about becoming a member and the perks available to you for becoming a patron yourself, visit patreon.com/donteatyouryoung. You can learn more about the show, share your story to join Beth as a guest, or connect with our wonderful community in our Facebook group. You can find all those links and more at donteatyouryoung.com, and now, on with the show.
Beth Quaas:
Welcome to Don't Eat Your Young. I'm your host, Beth Quaas. Today, we have Sonya Spruill. She's a nurse from Charleston, South Carolina. She's been a nurse since 2006. We're going to talk today about mentoring new nurses, some of the trials and tribulations that come along with that, as well as what it takes to form a Magnet hospital, from the nursing perspective. So, welcome, Sonya.
Sonya Spruill:
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Beth Quaas:
I'm excited to talk to you today, and you're coming to us from South Carolina?
Sonya Spruill:
Yes, good old Charleston.
Beth Quaas:
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your nursing career, and what brought you to here.
Sonya Spruill:
So, I have been a nurse since 2006. I went to an ADN program, and I was trying to find my niche in nursing, as most people do, just thinking you have one thing figured out. I wanted to do pediatric med-surg, and quickly found out that was not what I needed to do. So, I was able to find a new grad position in the OR, and that was where I really found my niche and my people. So, I was there for 11 years. In 2017, I transitioned out into a nursing professional development role, which is basically clinical education in the centralized department, but I still supported the ORs, including ones that I had worked for. So, it was a good transition because I was able to understand a lot of the nurses that were coming through, and what they were going to be expecting to deal with coming on board into that environment.
Beth Quaas:
And I've had several OR nurses on the podcast, and of course, I've worked for with them for decades, but the orientation that you go through is quite extensive, and a lot of people don't have a good experience with that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sonya Spruill:
My orientation at the time was not very structured, so we didn't have a structured program like there is now, where you have defined didactic information, as well as a different structured hands-on component. It was kind of, "Here, we're going to do this today. We're going to look at this video, and then we're going to put you basically into the frying pan, here you go. We're going to see if you sink or swim." And so, a lot of my preceptors at the time were not very patient. There were some, but there were also some that were not very patient. And so, it was very hard to kind of know what you're expected to do, when you have no background. This is not something that's taught in nursing schools. It's a different set of skills, different set of expectation, anticipation, not really knowing how to manage this type of environment, and taking care of a patient in this way.
Beth Quaas:
And the culture of the OR is different I think, than anywhere else in the hospital?
Sonya Spruill:
Yes, it is. It's a very intense culture, I would say, an intense environment. You're dealing with a lot of different personalities all at once. You have the temperament of a surgeon, you have anesthesia personnel that you're dealing with. You have also here, at a academic medical center, then you have medical students, residents, anyone else that's kind of learning at the same time, and it can be very intense and a very high pressure type of situation, where your thinking has to be kind of steps ahead, which is hard to learn straight out the gate. It's something that happens, you pick up along the way, but that also comes with having great preceptors, and a great type of plan in place for orientation so you're able to feel confident and get to that point.
Beth Quaas:
And I would say, and you can speak to this as well, you can do the same procedure, you can do a laparoscopic gallbladder, but every surgeon might do it just a little bit differently. So, when you say try to stay a step ahead, you have to know all of those nuances, which don't just come with an orientation. That takes experience and a lot of time.
Sonya Spruill:
It does, and I think that's where a lot of new nurses kind of get down on themselves, and I was definitely in that same position. I had high expectations for myself, and I couldn't figure out, "Why couldn't I get it? I've done this procedure before." But like you said, to your point, it's a different surgeon, so they could be within the same group, but they each do things so very differently, based on their own training and their experience. So, you're having to learn new languages over and over, it seems.
Beth Quaas:
Right. And now that you are on the education side of things and mentoring new nurses, do you think you had an advantage or a disadvantage, maybe coming in as a brand new nurse?
Sonya Spruill:
I would say I had an advantage, and the reason why I say that is because when you're straight out of nursing school, the slate is kind of still clean. You don't really have enough of, I would say, experience on a different floor, where it seems that you could become jaded, or too set in your ways, as far as how you learn and how you intake information. So, I've seen it on both sides in the education side where we have experienced nurses coming in from another department, and sometimes it's hard for them to flip into a different mode, because it is a different mode when you're into the OR. And so, having to go from an expert back to a novice is very hard for a lot of people, whereas coming as a new grad, you know already, "Well, I don't really know much. I just know I graduated." So, they tend to take the information a little bit easier, because they know everything is brand new for them anyway.
Beth Quaas:
Well, and the patient care is a little bit different.
Sonya Spruill:
Yes.
Beth Quaas:
It's different.
Sonya Spruill:
Yes, it is. Your patient's asleep, you have to be an advocate for your patients and be that safety person, even though that means sometimes coming up against temperaments that may not be as accepting of how much you notice, and the things that you're trying to achieve with safe patient care. But that's the thing that's the hardest part of the learning curve is, "How do I develop that OR voice? How do I get the confidence to be able to speak up, if I know something is wrong? But how do I say something, even though I know I'm brand new? How am I going to be respected? They're going to hear me."
Beth Quaas:
That is something too, that I don't think we teach in nursing school as well, and Don't Eat Your Young, this podcast speaks exactly to that. How do we keep nurses in these positions, by making them feel confident and knowledgeable, and give them what they need? And I know that we lack a lot in our profession.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah, that is true, and I think definitely in these last couple of years, nurses have been stretched really thin. Burnout is a real thing. And so, when you have the same volume of cases that are coming in, but you have less resources, particularly, or you might not have the same staff, because the turnaround is kind of high. So, everyone's trying to keep up with the pace, and then when you add on throwing in someone who's brand new, who has no idea, nursing staff are not as patient, as probably if things were different a few years ago.
So, it's kind of discouraging to new nurses that are coming into the OR, because it's, "I want to be here, but then I have nursing staff who they're tired, they've been here on call, they've had to pick up extra shifts, they're orienting all the time, they have a new person every day. How am I going to get as much from this learning experience as I need to, without frustrating them even more?" So, I think it's a hard line that is already drawn, and new orientees really don't know how to navigate around them.
Beth Quaas:
Which leads me to believe with your experiences, when you went into that education and mentoring role, you were phenomenal at it, because you knew what people needed.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah, I mean, I had been there. I didn't forget, even with the experience that I gained. I always said that once I got more experience and I was going to start precepting and mentoring, that I wanted to be different than those that had precepted, and I didn't have a mentor that precepted me. So, I didn't want to continue that same pattern, because I knew that went nowhere. It was only because someone else gave me a different perspective on it, because I was, at one point on orientation, I just had to figure out, "Is it me? I want to be here, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I feel like I'm always doing something wrong. I shouldn't be crying coming to work. I shouldn't feel like, 'Oh, well they won't miss me, it doesn't matter.'"
But it wasn't until I talked with someone and they said, "You know what? Let's think about this a little bit differently," and it was my educator at the time, she said, "Let's do something a little bit different. Let's just see," and it was that second round of opportunity that I got the chance to say, "Okay, this is my place. I'm learning. I'm not having as much of the same experiences as I was before." I think people kind of had to put a pause on the intimidation factor, or the games that tends to happen, and that was with our whole class. And so, they realized, "Okay, we need to adjust and do things a little bit differently," and that made a difference for me, and that's why I said that I was going to be different, and doing that differently as a preceptor propelled me when I came into the education realm, that I was going to treat them the same, and do something different and actually look at them as a whole person, not just a number that's filling in a spot.
Beth Quaas:
Right, and as you mentioned, COVID kind of threw us into the warm body mentality, and none of us felt good about it, it was just the reality at the time. So, I'm glad you bring that up. Now you're educating new operating room nurses. Can you talk a little bit about Periop 101?
Sonya Spruill:
Yes. So, the program, we do utilize Periop 101 as kind of our didactic foundational basis, to give just some background information for all people that are new to the OR. What we do with that is we take that, but then talk about more of how to apply that to their everyday practice, so where they're going to be. So, not teaching to the module information, because everyone can read on their own, we're not going to be doing that, but just to say, "Okay, how do you take this concept of surgical energy? How do you apply that in a safe manner?" Well, have these different components. You have your electrocautery, you have your Bovie pads. So, how are we going to make our patients safe with this? What are the things that we need to do that's going to be safe for everyone in that situation, and what that looks like?
So, I think having that kind of, "This is what you need to do with the information," has helped a lot more people. Kind of adding in some skills labs, putting our hands-on equipment, being able to connect things, it kind of makes things make sense of what they're reading, because you get slides and you look at 50 different slides, and it's like, "Oh gosh, I'm dumb. I should be paying attention," but your mind has shifted after a period of time, and all of it's not really sinking in. But when you look at it from the hands-on point and you actually put your hands on it, you see it, you see how it works in a non-anxiety ridden environment, where it's just a class, there's no patient involved. It kind of puts people a little bit more at ease and they feel a little bit more comfortable, and the understanding kind of takes place there.
Beth Quaas:
That has got to be so much better than what used to happen when you came in the OR, and really, you learned on the fly. And I'll tell you, for anybody that's ever been in the OR, right before incision, you have to have about 18 hands to plug everything in and get everything set, because you're the one that's not sterile, and they're handing you the sterile wires and tubes, and you have to have it all set up it instantaneously, and then during the procedure, if they start pulling specimens-
Sonya Spruill:
Oh yeah, trying to keep up.
Beth Quaas:
... I tell you, I sit below that drape, because I know that I couldn't keep up with everything, and they're barking off sites and specimens, and I tell you what, it takes a special kind of person to do what you do.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah, and it's just something a lot of the new orientees, they'll tell me about procedures that they've done. We do a debrief usually every week. And so, they say, "Oh, I saw this procedure. We have 50 specimens, I don't know how to keep up with all of that, and how do I get better?" And I said, "Unfortunately, it's going to be just practice and time. There's no magic tip. I could teach you how to be organized, but how that looks to me, may not be the same for you. So, you're going to have to figure out in your practice what works best for you, but also make sure you have complete information, so we can give you these tidbits, but what that looks like in real time is going to be kind of different."
But yeah, it is overwhelming. Not only do you have to have the OR voice to be able to speak up, but you have to have the OR ears. So, you're hearing all nuances of what's happening. Surgeon, and you can attest this too, can be talking in a normal tone discussing probably something non-surgery related, and in the midst of that, automatically say, "Oh okay. We got to do something," or they just change the inflection in their voice, and you know it's becoming a more complex or serious situation. If you're not kind of keen to that or listening out, then you miss that, and then it's like, oh gosh, now you got to scramble, and [inaudible 00:15:19] not prepared, you don't know what you're doing. So, all of that, so.
Beth Quaas:
If the listeners could see me, I'm shaking my head yes. Oh my gosh, yes, because if you don't listen, like you said, it's a normal conversation going on about something, and then all of a sudden, it's "Raise the bed," or "Do something," and then a second or two later, either the RN or the scrub tech in the room raises their voice to let me know, "You missed that there." So, people that are in it understand that.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it could go from zero to 60 in any given moment, even if it's something that's regularly scheduled, not an immediate emergency type of situation.
Beth Quaas:
So, what else? Who else are you teaching besides the new nurses coming in?
Sonya Spruill:
Besides new to OR, we do have some experienced staff that do come in. Of course, travelers that come in as well, just kind of keeping them kind of abreast as to what policies look like here, what the standard of practice is at that location, just keeping them on the same page. And then we also have some international nurses that are coming in from different countries, so trying to give them more or less an abbreviated and kind of accelerated Periop 101 in their respective... They have experience, but not experience here in the States. So, just kind of showing them what that looks like here, and getting them familiar with technology here, and us learning from them as well to know where they are, what their practice has been, what healthcare is like in their country. So, I get the chance to get that experience as well.
Beth Quaas:
And the naming of instruments, they're not all called the same by every person, and it blows my mind when that the surgical techs and nurses, they know it all. They know the names, and the different names.
Sonya Spruill:
It is, right, because that's part of things in our Periop class that we go over with anyone that's coming in. We discuss names of instruments, we pull out account sheets, and look at it and say, "Okay, are you familiar with these names?" And they're like, "Well, no. I haven't seen that before. What do you guys call it?" So, we'll talk about names, and then they'll say names that they're familiar with, and then we also talk about the nicknames, because it's not just the name that's on the sheet, there are various nicknames, depending on where they train, they call it all kinds of things. Some things make sense, some don't. It's like, "I don't even know how they come up with that name," but "I don't know either, but this is what you'll hear. So, this is what they're talking about."
Beth Quaas:
And on top of all that, then you throw in new equipment, and the sales rep that comes in the room and is moving things, and-
Sonya Spruill:
Yes.
Beth Quaas:
... that's a whole different ball game when they come in.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah, it is. Yeah, when you have all these additional, I would say, I guess visitors, vendors that come in, then it's an added, because they're limited in their capacity, and they know a lot about their product, but trying to keep them, "Okay, I understand. Thank you. That you're here, that you have the insight and you can give some helpful information," but you have to keep them in a particular line, because they're not clinical, so they can't operate in a clinical manner, no matter how familiar they are with the surgeon, and the specialty, and the surgery and the procedure. Maybe they're here every day, but just trying to keep them kind of in their place. I mean, they are a good resource for information, because they are well versed in their product. So, I mean, they do provide a lot of great help in that manner.
Beth Quaas:
I would say that you said that in the kindest way, and sometimes you just want to say, "Stay in your lane."
Sonya Spruill:
Yes.
Beth Quaas:
"You talk about your equipment or your product, otherwise, we're here to run the OR. Thank you very much."
Sonya Spruill:
Yes, yes. "Let me run my room, please."
Beth Quaas:
Yes.
Sonya Spruill:
"You stay right there. Just give me the information, so I can put it in the documentation. I appreciate it."
Beth Quaas:
Absolutely.
Sonya Spruill:
And I will say, there are some that have bailed me out quite a few times, scrubbing into specialties that I had not really done on a regular basis, and just kind of feeling like a fish out of water, and I'm like, "Oh, thank God a vendor's here. Can you just tell me what they're calling this? I just need to know what they refer it this as. Give me the nicknames, tell me what's next, what are the steps? Because I know you know the steps," and that's helped me, but yes, there are some times it's like, "I just need you to just stay over there. Please."
Beth Quaas:
But you're right, many of them are very kind people and extremely knowledgeable. So, then you decided to get more involved in your hospital committees and things like that, and I know when we talked before, we talked about Magnet status, and I'm interested in that because I've never worked in a Magnet hospital, and I know we talked a little bit about what it takes to get there. So, could you talk a little bit about that and that process?
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah. So, while I was a nurse OR, an opportunity came up for me to be involved in the Magnet Committee. There was a nurse that was leaving and she said, "Well, we still need a representative to carry on the work," because at this point, we had not been designated as of yet. We were still on the journey. I said, "Hey, you know what? I want to do some more things. I want to kind of spread my wings a little bit, add some more knowledge." To me, I was always one that kind of sought out different things, and it was an opportunity for me to just hear what other people on other units were talking about, because in the OR, you're secluded. No one knows what goes on behind the red line. So, it's kind of like no one understands. And so, being able to listen to other people on other units talk about their journey for Magnet as well, and their staffing issues and things of that nature, it was kind of eyeopening, so I enjoyed it.
I was there when we got the interview, we had the visit. I was there coaching staff, they had some staff that were chosen to interview with the surveyors, and being like, "Hey, we do these things, it just looks different in the OR." So, it was a kind of hard hill upward to try to make it look... People were like, "Well, I don't understand. The Magnet stuff is only for inpatient nursing. The OR doesn't apply," but it does. We just do things differently. So, we do all of these patient-centered care initiatives, it just looks different from our standpoint, but we are part of this.
And so, trying to coach them into making sure they understood the process and felt a little bit more comfortable being interviewed, and it went well. We got our designation, and so, that was a great day for everybody, and I know a part of that was trying to encourage nurses to get their bachelor's degree, those that didn't, and I know some people felt some kind of way about that because they're like, "Well, I have an associate's degree. That's just as good as a bachelor's degree. I don't plan on doing anything different. Why do I need to do that now?" Especially those that are well into their careers.
And so, aside from those, there were some that kind of felt like, "Oh, well maybe I do want to do something differently. So, sure, I'll go forward and get my bachelor's, or now I will try to become certified, because I've been here a few years, and I definitely have the eligibility, I just don't know how to go about doing it." So, in addition to that, I also was a certification coach for CCI, for the CNOR. So, I was able to get materials and kind of help people study for the exam, and get them signed up for the exam, and things like that. So, the Magnet journey, it was an interesting one. I think people learned a lot. Some things, they were kind of, like I said, not really supportive of, but it was good that we got the designation, and just recently redesignation, so.
Beth Quaas:
Oh nice, and I know we talked about that before, because we're both ADN nurses, and some of the smartest, best nurses I know are ADN nurses, and I probably would've been in the camp of, "Why do we have to get a BSN?" And yeah, I don't know. For the designation, I don't think that that gives a nurse any better patient care skills, but it might open their eyes to more things that are out, there that we may not realize.
Sonya Spruill:
Right, and I think that was the picture I wanted to paint for them, to say, "No, no one is saying that you are forced to do this. However, if you want to expand and do something a little more elevated or different, you are going to have to eventually do that, but it also helps you to get the things that we didn't get in an ADN program." Our ADN program taught us how to hit the job running like, "Here we are, you are ready to go," because we had to manage the skills, as well as the schoolwork, all at the same time.
It taught us time management and prioritization, I think better than a lot of bachelor's programs, because they're front loaded on information, and you get clinicals at the end, so you don't really get that peace until later, and some tend to struggle coming out of that. Not everyone, some do better than others. But I think that it was a hard sell for those that had an ADN and were like, "Oh, they only want us to do this because of this journey right now," but I think it worked out. Like I said, we got redesignation recently, so I think people are more calm about it at this point.
Beth Quaas:
And did your hospital at that point, did they help financially, people wanting to go back and get an advanced degree?
Sonya Spruill:
Yes. So, they had scholarships for the local, college because there's a College of Nursing attached. So, they offered scholarships for nurses who wanted to take advantage of that. Also, they offered tuition assistance. So, there were multiple ways that they wanted to support people, to go about getting that extra degree.
Beth Quaas:
So, what's next for you? What do you see yourself doing over the next few years?
Sonya Spruill:
Let's see. Next for me? Hope to continue in education, maybe something on a different scale, maybe something more on the development side, developing content, or assisting with developing content. That's kind of where I'm hoping to go in my next steps.
Beth Quaas:
How about teaching, beyond hospital education?
Sonya Spruill:
So, I thought about that. I did get a small taste when I did my MSN program, where I was responsible for a couple of clinical groups, and I got to teach a class. That was very daunting, I'm going to say. I'm used to teaching smaller groups. The max we would have in the Periop class is 10. To go from that to 170 was a lot. I managed to get through it, but I don't know if nursing faculty is my calling. I enjoyed it, it was a great learning experience for me, and I'm not sure. I mean, I'm going to say I'm going to keep my mind open. I don't like to say I'll never do anything, because I probably would've said I would never be an OR nurse, years ago, but here we are. So, keep my mind open.
Beth Quaas:
I think what better person could teach the education for the OR than somebody that's lived in it like you have, and were mentored the way you were, and saw the way you wanted to be mentored and precepted, and precepting other people now, I think is amazing. So, people that learn from you will have a leg up once they step into the OR.
Sonya Spruill:
Well, thank you, I appreciate that. I just realized, people forget about the whole component of the fact that people have a whole life outside of the OR. The OR is not the end-all, be-all. And so, when you have things that are going on outside, sometimes it can affect, and that's something that I always kind of saw into people, just kind of knowing that this is frustrating, this is hard, this is a lot that you're having to learn. It's fast-paced, and you feel like if you don't get it the first time then you're never going to get it.
But one of the things I always would say at the end of a Periop class is I give what I call my grace speech, is having grace with yourself, because you want to be probably farther than you are, and it's frustrating in the beginning, because you feel like you're never going to grasp the concept, it's not fast enough. How are you ever going to get it all, and make it all sense? But you have to have that grace with yourself to know it takes a moment, and if I didn't have that with myself, I would've quit anyway. I just had to get up and say, "Okay, it's a new day. I know I want to be here. I got to figure out how to make it work." That's how I was able to survive, and I tell people all the time, it's hard, because we're always hardest on ourselves. We're our worst critic, but if you allow yourself just that little bit, it actually ends up working out in the end. So, people tend to feel okay after that and after being with the class, because they have less anxiety.
One of the things we also, we like to do role playing and put them through a little bit of anxiety where they have to be in that role, and I would pretend to be a surgeon and kind of pull from temperaments that I had dealt with over the years, and put that little bit of pressure like, "This is what you're going to experience, but this is a safe zone, because you don't have a real patient, but this is the pressure you're going to have to feel. So, how are you going to manage? How are you going to deal with all of the things that can be a distractor, and anxiety that you're going to feel? And this is the time to play it out and think it through," and I think that kind of helps as well.
Beth Quaas:
Oh, I think that has to help, because what better place to do it than, like you said, without a patient? But you get the feeling, you get the knot in your gut, some intimidating loud surgeon is breathing down your neck about something that may or may not be urgent at the time, but to them, they think it is. So, I think that's a fantastic learning opportunity.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah.
Beth Quaas:
What inspiration would you like to share with nurses? And I'm so glad that you came on and you talked about giving yourself grace, and I think you're a very calming presence, so I'm very happy that you're in the role that you're in, but what else would you like to share with nurses right now?
Sonya Spruill:
This is only because of some things that I've learned. Even from orientees, I'm learning a lot from them and feeling like, "Did I make the right decision? Is this the right choice?" I would say allow yourself some time to kind of settle in, and just try to take it day by day. That's the only thing you really can do. You can't jump ahead. It's just not possible. But if you take it day by day, and even if you're having a bad day, figure out what you can still learn from the bad day. Was it, "Maybe this is not the preceptor I want to be? I don't want to be that way." You learned it. You learned, "Okay, I don't want to be that way, so what can I still gain from each day?" Because there's something to always learn. Your learning never stops.
I tell them all the time too, I've been an OR nurse for 11 years, but I never stopped learning, because there's things that are always changing. Technology is advancing. I always wanted to be a constant student. So, always learning, always looking at different things, I said, and just thinking about people coming in now, you can always learn something from each experience, no matter how small, and you take each of those things and that's how you can develop your practice. You can develop confidence that way, the more that you are looking at those things from that perspective, thinking about these patients as every patient is a VIP. So, always thinking about that.
Don't skimp steps. Don't try to have the workaround. I know nurses, it's horrible. We do try to come up with all workarounds to make life a little bit faster, but you just always have to think about being a patient advocate, because that's why you're here. And just taking it from that perspective, and not that this is just a job, because it's not. Nursing is a calling, I do believe that. And so, you just have to really take note of that, and soak everything in.
Beth Quaas:
I love that. I think that is so important for people to hear. We can learn from even the bad situations that we're in. If it's not what we want to do, it's what we definitely don't want to do, and I think the more we can do that, eventually we gain the confidence, like you said, but we also gain respect from others, when we aren't afraid to stand up and advocate for our patients and ourselves, and those around us.
Sonya Spruill:
Yes.
Beth Quaas:
I have a feeling that you wouldn't mind if people interested in the operating room reached out to you, because I think you would have words of wisdom for them, or nurses out practicing now.
Sonya Spruill:
Yeah, totally. I don't mind it at all. I'm always a person that's an encourager. I guess that's kind of my temperament. So, I always do like to be a calming presence. I considered myself to be a person that was kind of grace under pressure, because you didn't see it on my face, but that was how I had to survive like, "Okay, don't let it show, don't let it show. You just got to get through it," and just start thinking my way out of what was happening, and just maneuvering from there. So sure, I definitely don't mind people reaching out if they have questions about starting in the OR, and things like that. I'm definitely open to that.
Beth Quaas:
Well, thank you. I so appreciate you coming on the show and telling your story, and I think you really do have a calming presence, so I appreciate that as well.
Sonya Spruill:
Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.
Speaker 4:
(Singing).
Intro/Outro:
Don't Eat Your Young was produced in partnership with TruStory FM, Engineering by Andy Nelson, music by The Light Hearts. Find the show, show notes, and transcripts at donteatyouryoung.com. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show, but the best thing you could do to support the show is to share it with a friend or colleague. Thank you for listening.
