129 - Chris Sloan (First Name) Pt 1: Never in a Million Years

Join Gonzaga University’s Director of Undergraduate Programming and Development and San Diego, California native Honored Guest Chris Sloan as she waxes eloquent about how she entered the nursing field, not being a bad or stellar student, her unimaginable and challenging nursing career path (including being on the forefront of bone marrow transplant), taking a little break from nursing to be an office manager, her shocking re-entry into bedside nursing, the challenge of working in education when not able to concurrently work bedside, hers and the host’s mutual love of touring graveyards, and more!

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Feeding Our Young podcast. ah So I'm very, very excited about this episode. I know you've never heard me say that before, but I'm very excited for multiple reasons. ah One, this is a surprise, but not a surprise. It's very dichotomous recording here that we've got going on because I am both tremendously surprised and not surprised at our honored guest today. This is one of those individuals that ah has a very busy schedule, as we all do, and... brought up long ago, hey, love to have you on the podcast. She's like, absolutely. We actually even had something slated and then things went down and she got more stuff put on her plate. I don't know how. I don't know how the stuff doesn't fall off. But the long and the short of it is, now here we are. And I get a text from her saying, hey, I think my schedule's freeing up. I can actually get signed up again. Okay, great. That link I sent you still works. I only have availability posted through the end of May. Blah, blah, blah. And she's like, what about this afternoon? I was like, You Yes, please. Okay, let's go. um So I just love that. So without any further ado, I won't waste her time, yours or mine, I would like to introduce Dr. First Name, comma, Last Name. Welcome to the studio, Dr. Comma First Name, comma Last Name. Okay, I'm sorry, for the benefit of everybody, who am I talking to? Thank you. Thank you for having me, Eric. So this is the honorable Dr. Chris Sloan and we'll get into what she does and all the things but I had to do the first name last name her first take on the intro uh The thing I send out says first name last name and that's what she read and just started laughing and I'm like I've got to use that for the intro if you don't mind, Chris. So, Dr. Firstname, would you like to introduce yourself to everybody and tell us, basically, guess, what degrees do you hold? How long have you been a nurse? my, I'm Dr. Chris Sloan, but please just call me Chris because that is my, that makes me more comfortable. ah My degrees, I have a bachelor's of nursing from the University of Arizona almost 40 years ago, almost 1986. 86, so you started when you were about seven or eight years old, I'm doing the math. Yeah, got it, okay. I was really a very exceptional child. I got a master's degree from Point Leman-Azerine University in 2008 and I finished a PhD in nursing from the University of San Diego in 2015. Yeah. Yes. am so grateful for that because what does that education allow you to do? What is your position that you currently hold? ah I am currently the Director of Undergraduate Programming and Development in the Nursing Program at Gonzaga University. Chief Cook and Bottle Washer at Gonzaga Nursing Program. Much like Huck, phlebotomist, nurse, all the things, So with that, Chris, where is home for you? Where do you call home? Where are you from? Yeah, so now I call Spokane home, but um prior to being in Spokane, we've only been here for four years. I was in San Diego for 30 years and my husband and I raised a family there and I did a number of different nursing things, but I was actually born in Arizona. And so I have this kind of weird West Coast, you know, attachment, both sort of the desert, the beach and the forest. And I don't think it gets any better than that. Yes, that's right. Right. We just, you know, Eric, we moved here four years ago because my dad has Alzheimer's and he is here in town. And so. I wanted to be closer to him. hadn't really lived near him since college. My parents got divorced right after I graduated from college and my dad married someone else and they moved around a lot. So it's been really lovely. But also a secret, my husband and I went to Whitworth for two, I went for two years and he went for four. So we had a connection to Spokane. We always, always wanted to come back. So it's pretty cool how that all works out. I do love how I know well we're gonna dive into that story here soon. That's for sure I'm gonna. I'm not flapping my guns. This is the Dr. Chris Sloan. Dr. First name last name our Okay, I'm gonna stop bringing that up, but I just can't help it. It's like it's so fun. Okay All right, so Having served many roles both as a nursing student then nurse now, you know, I mean all the way up the food chain What are the three words, we'll talk about it at the end, but what are the three words I'm most eager to find out? What were the three words you chose to describe nursing school? My first one is life altering. My second one is stretching. And my third one is fascinating. Just like the words themselves. I love it. uh And I, being a postpartum nurse, mind you, and a happily married man with five children, I can say that when you said stretching, I was like, that just lends itself to all sorts of things. Like nursing students having stretch marks, like from all the learning. Anyway, all right, moving along. uh And then three of your favorite songs in life right now. I really don't like this question. It's very much going to date me. um But I am I am not I told Eric I'm not a huge told you I'm not a huge music person, but probably my all time favorite artist is James Taylor. And so I'm kind of uh any James Taylor song, but my the one that. makes me still just feel warm and fuzzy as you've got a friend. uh And it starts out, you know, when you're down and lonely. And it just, yeah, it's just something I love to play when I'm just having a moment. so that's number one. Number two, okay, this really ages me because I guess I was around when it came out, but is lovely is lovely day by Bill Withers. yeah! and it just has such a great beat like I don't know I love that song and then here's the last one it is very corny and I'm just gonna own up to it and that is Africa by Toto and I love that song just because I have been to Africa several times and it's a place near and dear to my heart and I don't know I just love it when I hear it it makes me think of my trips so yeah And is something else I want to discover along the way as we're chatting. So with that, uh man, I feel like we can just dive into the deep end, but I have that one last little superficial thing that I really like to do. ah And Dr. Chris Sloan, have been warned, right? And prepared, but not prepared with the questions. You are about to be administered the patent not pending unofficial feeding our young personality test. Are you ready? I am ready. Alright, and you can give rationales if you feel compelled, or you can do straight quick answers, it's up to you. Would you rather have never have to wait in line again, or always have a parking spot? Oh, never have to wait in line again. hate waiting in line. Hate have driven hundreds of miles out of the way to not sit in a traffic jam. No, true story. True story. said, I don't care if it takes longer. Yeah, San Diego for many years. That makes sense. All right. Then would you rather lose the ability to lie or believe everything you're told? Hmm lose the ability to lie Love it. Would you rather never be able to go out during the day or never be able to go out during the night? night. No thought there. Isle seat or window seat? I'll, every time. Well, this has been nice Chris. I really appreciate your time here. I'm gonna go look for other jobs elsewhere. It's been nice talking to you. Just kidding. uh I may or may not be a window seat guy myself, but that's okay. That's all right. I Seein we were just talking about this right? I love it. I love it um And then would you rather have one wish granted today again the caveat being? you don't get a wish for more wishes. Would you rather have one wish granted today or 10 wishes granted 20 years from now? I think just for my age, I probably need to have it today. I only got it today. That is my philosophy in life. Age notwithstanding. We'll leave the age thing alone. What if, okay, what if it were 10 years from now? Wow. I'm trying to sweeten the deal. don't know. I'm changing the test on the fly. I really am, and maybe it's some of my nursing background, but I really am a believer in that we only have today and we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. so being granted a wish at all would be awesome. So that's my answer. Yeah. Well, the results are in and if you didn't know already, you're outstanding. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's very scientific, I'm telling you. uh All right, with that, I'm already getting the research, like I'm trying to, right? Like I'm just trying to massage that research muscle, get a little feel there. May or may not be documenting the results of these things. So, Chris, let's... Let's start by talking about your career because, uh you know, and let's go on the way back machine just a few years, right? So I'm going to start with the most basic fundamental questions of all and the one I love hearing the answers to the most. How and what, like when did you know you wanted to be a nurse? Why nursing? Oh man, I had no one in my family who was a nurse, no one who was medical, but I knew that I loved science and I wanted to take care of people. And I grew up in a home where My mom and dad were very active um socially. so things like, it was not uncommon for us to have like people at our dinner table who were from the local drug treatment center or, you know, to work in a soup kitchen on a weekend. And I just really loved people and I wanted to do something that was people oriented combined with science. So I had no clue what nurses did. um I actually started by sort of choosing the whole physical therapy path, but two years into school, so when I was uh at Whitworth for a few years, Whitworth University here in Spokane, I I just started thinking, you know, it seems like a really big decision at this point in my life to choose one thing that I'm going to do forever. And I got really overwhelmed with that. some friends of our family, the mom, the woman was a nurse and she said, why don't you come with me and I will show you all the things that nurses do. And so I spent a day sort of, we just sort of took like the grand tour of the hospital. took all day, was so cool. We went to the OR, we went to the NICU, and we went to the medical units, and we went to outpatient clinics, and I went and talked to the basically the chief nurse administrator person, and I just thought, wow, this is so cool. Like, I can do nursing stuff and I can do, I can take care of people, but I also have room to move and grow. And you can tell from one of my answers that I'm not a good waiter, sitter person. And so, and so I thought this will be, this will be really great. It will open doors for me. So that's why I chose nursing. So I, It's kind of a long story, but I started at um Whitworth as a pre-health major. And then my husband, he wasn't my husband. And this is a whole nother podcast, so don't ask me. oh man, my husband will be like rolling his eyes when he hears this. He was supposed to go to medical school. We're both from Arizona. so, um I transferred to the University of Arizona nursing program with the intent that he was coming the next year so that we could be together and he'd go to medical school and then he chose not to go to medical school and blah, blah, blah. It's a long story. But anyway, we did ultimately get married. So that's the scoop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I got into U of A. It took me a couple semesters. I didn't get in right away, which, you know, I wasn't a bad student, but I wasn't a stellar student either. And it was hard. It was hard to wait. And I had to kind of like take classes at community college to not pay back my student loans and stuff for a while. It made me a little bit, I was 22 when I graduated instead of kind of the proverbial 21. So yeah, so it was good. It was really good. It was great program. yeah. So then, I mean, so you become a nurse, you graduate with your bachelor's degree, and so then you begin to practice, I assume, and if you're practicing, where did you practice? What fields have you partaken in as a bedside nurse in that role? I'm a little bit of a be all that you can be in nursing. You know, that whole idea of you can do a lot of things in nursing that attracted me. I decided to explore that. But I started on basically a med surge unit that did a lot of cardiac. no telemetry at that point. Telemetry was only for the ICU, but we did have a lot of like post-cardiac cath patients and I don't know, chest pain and that kind of stuff. But then we also had oncology patients and I really loved the oncology patients. Many of them were sick and got sent to other facilities for bone marrow transplants. So When we moved to San Francisco two years after my getting my degree, I went to work at UCSF um on the bone marrow transplant unit, oncology, adult BMT. Now, here's the woo part about it. It was 1989. m We had no such drugs as Zofran or Neupogen. um So our patients would be neutropenic. And for those of you listening who don't remember what that is, it's not having the ability to fight infection. They'd be neutropenic for 60 to 70 days before their counts came back. And so they had every bizarre infection you could think of. They were all on TPN and lipids. They were all very sick. They all got amphotericin, which we called ampho-terrible or shake and bake at night. And it was a really hard time to be in nursing. It was really hard for me. So I had kept having all these nightmares that my husband was dying of leukemia and yeah, it was really, it was just a tough. place to work, except I loved my patients and I loved the population and I loved that bone marrow transplant really was still relatively new. I mean, it really started in like the early 80s. So to only be 10 years in, there was a lot to learn. So I really enjoyed that. But then we decided to move again and we moved to San Diego and When I got to San Diego, I thought, you know, I'm almost ready to work at Taco Bell, but not quite. So I went looking for a job where my patients didn't all get amphotericin at night or ampho-terrible. And I ended up finding a really interesting job with the San Diego Blood Bank, being their donor center coordinator for the bone marrow registry, which was brand new. Ha Be The Match, that was brand new. And they were trying to get to a million donors. And the way they started was by going to Bloodbanks because Bloodbanks had HLA typed their platelet donors for platelet matching. So they tapped into that donor pool to see if they would be willing to be bone marrow donors. And it kind of went from there. So that was pretty wild. I was the donor center coordinator at Olive, I don't know, 25 or 26, whatever I was at that point. And we ended up having five patients from San Diego who donated marrow and I was able to take that marrow to wherever it was going. So the very first place I went was to Fred Hutchinson in Seattle. and got to the hospital and usually you have to go to like a lab or somewhere to drop the marrow off. It just looks like a bag of blood. It just looks like a, you know, and I got there and the coordinator on their end met me at the front door and said, no, we're going to go right to the patient's room. So we went right to the room of this little girl who's three and Her parents were having a massive re-birthday party for her in her room. And wow, it was a huge boohoo session for me. I mean, just, wow, intense. So, and they literally took the marrow out of the cooler I had it in, spiked it, know, hung it and started infusing it right there. So, it was pretty crazy. uh to be in that role, not only in that role period, and especially at the forefront of that particular science, but also to then get to see it like you're there! You're there! uh is I worked with some incredible human beings and people that are willing to be donors for someone they don't know. And at the time, I mean, now we do a lot of um procedures to collect that bone marrow where the patient doesn't have to go under, you know, the donor doesn't have to go under anesthesia. But at the time it was a bone marrow, basically like a bone marrow biopsy times two or 300. and they did it in the OR and you know, two people would be on either side of the patient going into the iliac crest with those needles over and over and over again trying to get marrow. So it was a big deal for people to say yes. And my gosh, I learned so much. I learned so, so much about people and yeah, but it was really an incredible experience, really. The old pedsonc nursing me is getting all excited again. I'm like, oh my gosh. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere postpartum. I'm fine, we're okay. I'm just like, oh. And to hear you talk about that though, we've talked about it before. Both you and I and me on this podcast have talked about how when you get into nursing, there are sentences you're going to, as long as you stick with the career and do all that, there are sentences you're gonna say you never thought you were ever going to be able to say. And so like, One of those things, for example, um like I, in my nursing career, was able to transfuse white blood cells to a patient. And most people hearing that are like, well, okay, great, a transfusion. No, no, no, you don't understand. We transfuse red blood cells, we transfuse platelets, we transfuse, you know, fresh frozen plasma, all the things. White blood cells are not a thing you transfuse. There's a high, high incident for uh anaphylactic reaction, all the things. And so I just happened to be the one on that shift when this wonderful patient of ours, you talk about, know, neupogen and trying to get those, you know, white blood cell counts back up. And we never had patients that would stay quite, you know, that long. That was quite some time. But we did. I'll never forget this kid. And he was just an amazing, stellar human being. And he just had an ANC of zero. You guys, that means literally no functional, uh no functional immune system whatsoever. And so he's living in the hospital. We've done everything we can to get it up and it's not going up. And so the last instrument the doctor ordered a white blood cell transfusion. I'm talking to my charge. I'm like, how do we do this? She goes, I don't know. I said, okay, cool. So we called the adult oncology unit and I'm like, hey guys, this is Eric on pedsonc. I'm about to transfuse white blood cells. I need to talk to someone who can help me know what I'm doing. And they're like, that'd be great except we've never done that before. Okay. Awesome! So I just, you know what mean, and I don't need to spend all this air time talking about the story other than the fact that, my goodness, hearing you talk about that, Chris, and what you, you know, that's not something I am, let me ask you this. Did you ever imagine yourself in that scenario doing that exact thing when you got your bachelor's degree? Never, never in a million years, no, absolutely not. Yeah, it was really an amazing opportunity. Yeah, and I did that for several years, um but then I got this really bizarre phone call out of the blue from a biotech company of all things. And San Diego is known for biotech and lots of drug discovery and that kind of stuff. And they said, hey, we're, um, the name of the company was Maro tech. Okay. Now they're gone and, things have moved on. So, but they had basically wanted to grow bone marrow. They wanted to grow bone marrow so that they could do transplants, but they weren't having any luck. So they ended up going to skin. fibroblasts and taking fibroblasts from babies from circumcision skin and growing that in culture and then using it in burn patients. Yeah. So they were like, would you be interested in talking to us about a clinical research job? And I was like, what? Like this is but I went and talked to them. really liked them. I didn't realize at the time how much travel my job was going to involve, but that's okay. But I did get to learn the clinical research side of things. So I em had seven burn centers on the East Coast that I was responsible for, and I was basically the clinical research associate. I went and trained them on how to use our product, and then I went and did all the auditing of the charts to make sure that, you know, the data they were collecting and saying that things they were seeing were the things that were documented in the charts, sort of like an audit. But I traveled a lot and we didn't have any kids at the time, so that was okay. I had real issues working in industry and em I think the problem was that this was a startup company. and they were living on sort of venture capital and they wanted their product to work. And so there's a lot of pressure on us and it started to feel a little like we were sort of stretching maybe the truth a little bit. And ah that made me very uncomfortable. we had one patient, most of our patients did not have good results. It turns out that when you have the wound bed and then you lay something in it and then you put a graft over the top of it, you know, in theory it should have helped that graft take, but what it really did is it sort of blocked like blood vessel formation and other things. So then those wounds got yucky again. They had to be debrided again. Yeah. So that wasn't so good. So I said to my husband, you know, just feeling like a mismatch here between my own values and this company, but I really love the bone marrow thing. I want to somehow get back into it. So see, this is the problem when you talk to somebody who's had a long nursing career like mine, you're going to get along. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. next appointment is a beautiful date with my wife, a dinner date. She's OK in that regard. So the question becomes if we as long as you have enough time and you're good with it, we'll just we'll spend this first episode diving into your career, all the things. Then we'll make a second episode about all the practical, all the advice you want to give and all the things. Does that work for you? Yeah, it totally works for me. so with that we're gonna have a two-parter, but continue with this amazing career. I'm like, I'm on the edge of my seat, I wanna know where you go next. so about that time Scripps Clinic, which was just across the street from my biotech company, up on the beautiful Torrey Pines Plateau in San Diego that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, had a position available for a bone marrow transplant coordinator and I thought okay this is it I'm gonna do this it's gonna be really awesome. So I interviewed I figured there'd be nurses and others you know within the institution but I ended up getting the position and I got to work with Dr. Barry Meisenberg who now is in He is in either Delaware or he's somewhere East Coast, far, Anyway, um he was a kind of a young, adventurous guy who had the idea of using stem cell transplant as a rescue for high dose chemotherapy for women with breast cancer. usually metastatic. So just for your listeners purpose, you know, when you give really high doses of chemo, it affects the bone marrow and your bone marrow makes sure red cells, white cells and platelets. And so if you give enough chemotherapy, you can wipe that bone marrow out and it doesn't recover kind of like your little friend you talked about earlier. And so the goal was let's give this really high dose chemotherapy, but then we'll rescue them with their own bone marrow. So that's what I did. I talked to all the patients. I went in on all the consults. I created all of their treatment calendars and plans, worked with um the stem cell um collection folks and getting people their neupogens so that they could, you know, we would, we put them on neupogen, even our patients, we'd put them on neupogen just to get their counts to go up. And then we would do, plasma, free sis to take off basically there, except it was stem cell free sis. So yeah, to take off there, it's kind of like dialysis to take their cells and, um, and then we would do the transplants and the big thing that he was into was outpatient transplants. So, Our patients came in every day and got their labs drawn and whatever their symptoms were dealt with, but then they went home and went back to their apartments. he did show that, he was able to show, we did several research papers together, that it definitely um shortened their stay, em made their recovery shorter. I mean, there were just a bunch of things that were benefits. The only problem was that it didn't work for breast cancer. And we tried it for a lot of things. We tried it for lymphoma. We tried it for multiple myeloma. We tried it for, and some of those now still, some of those diseases still use that modality, but not breast cancer. I saw a lot of like very young women like in their thirties with stage four breast cancer with little kids and I was really, really, um, moving for me, but I loved working with patients and loved doing all of that. But while I was doing that job, I had a kid, I actually ended up having two. So there came a time where I just wanted to be with my kids. And living in San Diego, we just could not afford for me to not work. So I went to part-time for a while at Scripps and that worked really well. um And then I got this really crazy opportunity to go work at my kid's school. It was a little private Christian school. I was on the board of the school. They lost their office manager and I'm driving to work one day and I'm like, ah I could drive to school with them. I could be there for lunch. could, I'll drive home with them every day. This could be pretty cool. What if I just took a little break from nursing? So that's what I did. I took a break for three years and I was the office manager of my kids school, but I was really good on the computer cause I had had these two kind of desk type jobs, um, sort of, uh, and so I was able to computerize all kinds of things for the school. I changed all of their forms for, you know, signing up for school and permission slips and all that stuff. did huge audits on all the preschool kids, immunizations. uh Yes. Yes. No, I didn't. And I had this one kid who would come into my office every day for medicine. His name was Jason. He had ADHD and he'd come in and we had two doors to the office. There was a front door where parents came in and the front desk was, and then there was the back door and that was like where the teacher's boxes were and the copy machine and whatever. And the medicine was in the back, but the kids were always supposed to come through the front. And every single day Jason would come in through the back and he would, it had a tile, a linoleum floor. He'd come in and he'd see, he'd run and he'd skid on his knees. and he'd come right up to where my desk was and he'd be like, hello, Mrs. Sloan. And I'd be like, hello, Jason. And he would look at me and he'd go, I know, I know, I need to go to the front. He'd turn around and walk out and go to the front. And I'm like, God, I love this kid. This kid is so funny. So it could be, a lot of people thought he was annoying, but I thought he was really sweet. He came from a really tough background, was being cared for by his grandma. And I just felt like I could give him a little bit extra TLC and love every day, which I really thought just was really meaningful to me. But I loved the kids. I loved them coming in with their tummy aches and their, you know, boo-boos and their splinters. And I just loved dealing with them. Their parents were interesting. As many of us are. Some were really annoying, but I started thinking, gosh, you know, I thought I never thought I wanted to do PEDs, but I know I don't, I'm not going to do this job forever. I need to get back into the game, but it was so cool. I had a mom who was the attorney for the local children's hospital. as one of my friends and she's like, well, when you're ready, let me know and I'll introduce you to a bunch of people. So that was pretty cool. But I did have these cool experiences. Like my daughter's kindergarten classroom was next door to my office and every day at lunch she would come in, give me a kiss, have a fake tummy ache, just long enough for lunch. And then she would go back to class every day. And her teacher was just like, she just wants to be with you at lunchtime. I'm like, cool, no problems. She'd come in and be my little helper. And um yeah, that was really sweet. And I did love taking them back and forth to school. We had a lot of just really quality time in the car, long San Diego commute, but just a lot of sweet singing. And yeah, I really loved that. So, but at some point I definitely needed to go back. to nursing. So my friend that I met introduced me to the oncology manager at Rady's and I really, had so much trepidation about it. It's like, I haven't done bedside nursing for a long time. I haven't done kids. I don't think I can do this. Like this is crazy. What am I thinking? And I went in and met their manager who I just absolutely adored and connected with and she's like, I can promise you days and it'll be great. And there's a lot of experienced staff on the unit and you'll do well. And so, yeah, so I bit the bullet and I went back to the bedside and wow, that was, wow. It was intense, but I absolutely loved it. You know, my very first day of being on my own, I am in report and the night nurse comes in and she says, oh, this patient. And she goes, think Chris, I think you have them. Yeah, they're just really crumpin'. They're not doing well. And I'm like, oh my God, what have I done? Like, why am I doing? I did not have to deal with this. A long way. Long story short, our patient was septic and ended up going to the ICU and I had loads of support from my team, such good team, like just there and... supported me and walked me through what we were doing. We got him to the PICU before anything bad happened, but it rattled me and I spent the rest of the day right on the edge of tears. I don't know if you've had this experience, Eric, but I'm sure other nurses have where you're just feeling so fragile about things. And anybody who came up to me and put their like hand on my back and said like, I heard you had a rough morning. How are you doing? I'd be like, no, no, can't talk about it. Gotta go. Cause otherwise I was just going to be a mess. And I got in the parking garage and I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. And I thought, what have I done? Why am I doing this? Like this is so crazy. These are kids. Like this is going to be so hard. And you really they think you know what you're doing because you have so much experience but you don't know what you're doing because it's kids and I got home and told my patient my husband that my patient went to the ICU and he said what did you do to them? I said why did you say that? said because you're crying I figured that you did something you know that put him there and I said no. And he's like, well, why are you crying, babe? And I was like, oh, I just feel so inadequate. So that was my big uh kind of re-entry to the bedside. But after that, man, I just, I got into it. I loved it. I took it on as a challenge and became the educator for the unit. And then And then that's when I decided to go back to school and get my masters. that's. does I so then I mean you become the hospital educator nurse educator at a hospital. How does the entering academia play in? How does that how do you make that progression? so I went back to school and I decided that I didn't want to be a nurse practitioner. I wanted to be a clinical nurse specialist at this hospital in San Diego. CNS's were the bomb diggity. They were the person. They were the group that really had a lot of power in the institution. They determined most of the nursing practice that was happening. Yeah. Exactly. So I thought, this is really cool. And I'm definitely a process person. I like looking at processes and I like fixing. I'm a systems thinker. So that seemed to really play into my my strengths. And so I started going to this small Christian school in San Diego, Point Loma Nazarene, and they had a great nursing education program, but they also had a family CNS track, which retrospect was not a great idea because um there is no family CNS certification. So anyway, I tried to make it bend and fit peeds. I did as much of my stuff in pees as I could, but it still didn't allow me to sit for the peed CNS certification for CNS. So, which is fine. You can still work as a CNS, just not board certified. um But while I was doing that, I really loved the education piece and I, one of my semesters in school, I had to spend with faculty and a bunch of students. And we were doing an adult clinical, which was confirmation for me that I had made the right decision going to Peds. Cause I was like, yucky, I never want to do adults again. But they really, it was like a med search floor and they were really uh elderly and not, you know, just not. not doing well, lot of feeding tubes and that kind of stuff. And that was really hard, but the students were incredible and I love them. And I could see how just a little word of encouragement or a brief conversation about, you know, their own life or their own goals or whatever, just moved and elevated them to a new, to a new place. And, the woman I was working with who the faculty was She sort of seemed to relish being a little bit scary. And so I felt like I was kind of the nice counterpart to that. I also feel like one of the gifts that I have is the ability to deliver hard things in kind of a serious, but sort of a winsome way, like, hey, this is where we are with things. It can't stay this way, but we're gonna move forward. So I felt like that was also a skill that I could bring to the table. And so right before I graduated with my masters, this school, Point Loma said, would you like full-time job teaching for us? And I was like, I'm in, I'm in. And I stayed for 15 years and taught peeds, taught farm, taught senior capstone, taught kind of like a first year, like nursing kind of 100 kind of class, taught Peds clinical the entire time. So I knew everyone at the hospital from the housekeepers to the chief nurse officer who, by the way, I could go to her if we needed things and be like, by the way, I've been told that there's no room for this or that. And she'd be like, what? Of course there's always room for you guys. So. That was really great, but I would, you know, I just developed these amazing relationships and for 12 of those 15 years I worked per diem. So I worked alongside those nurses and you'll love this Eric. One morning I was working on a post-surgical unit. So I'd always get like all the little post-sappy kids and the little post broken arms. And I just love those kids cause They're miserable. They don't want to get out of bed. They don't want to eat. They don't want you to touch them. And by the end of the day, you're like, we're going for a walk. We ate our lunch. We are like going to the playroom, like mom and dad. Oh my God. I just loved it. So I felt like in a day I could just make like huge progress with these kids. Um, but I get in one morning and because I'm pretty, I'm or casual or whatever it's called here in Spokane, but I, always floated first and they would always be like, we're so sorry. You have to float to the hemon unit or we're so sorry. You have to go to meds her and I'm like, I take my students there all the time. Like I know these units well, but one morning they said you have to go to hemon and, and, and the churches came over and held put her hand on my hand and she said, and you're gonna have to do a blood transfusion. I said, oh my God. I said, I think I've only given about a thousand of them in my career. So I had no problem with that and I loved doing it because then when I got to the classroom, I had so many stories and I knew all the drugs and I knew all the labs and I knew the latest thing in practice. So one really hard thing about moving to Spokane is I teach pharmacology and I have to work really hard to stay up on that because I am not working in the hospital and I am not doing that. No one will give me a four hour shift. Can you believe that? I think that is the world? I keep offering to every nurse manager I talk to and they're like, no, we don't do four hour shifts. Fine. Right. I mean, what's eight hours really in those four? uh But, um, it just hasn't worked out to do that. And now I'm really pretty busy with my current job. So, um, I haven't been able to do it, but that's what I did. And then I came to Gonzaga. Woo. That's it. Done. That's me in a nutshell. That is the journey that is Dr. Chris Sloan. I love hearing it and I hope you do too because uh for some people they're like, oh man, that's a long story or when I'm talking and I go off on my, yeah, it's a long, we get going. But the thing is, is there's so much to learn from the journey. All the different things that, again, hitting back to that fact that when you finally, okay, I'm gonna be a nurse, you got your bachelor's degree, all that, like. Yeah. You have no idea where this is gonna take you. mine is not, my story is not nearly as varied as yours. But on the same token, when I graduated and I got hired on pedsonc my number one choice out of nursing school, I was like, this is it, this is my career. Because I'm already starting older at 30 years old, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna be a night shift pedsonc nurse, the rest of my career I'm gonna retire and ride off into the sunset. Nope. So. Nope. uh that then, Chris, there's, man, there's so much I know that we want to talk about. So we're gonna wrap, we're gonna put a nice little bow on this episode. uh Since we've talked about your nursing journey, anything else you want to share, I'm gonna pull it back around from the nursing side of things to the not nursing side of things. Just if there's anything else you want to share about. your family. You've already mentioned your husband, your two kids. Is there anything you want to share about them? Did anybody follow in your footsteps? And the other question I had in my mind, I mean, you said there was nobody else in your family in healthcare. So has that changed moving forward? Are you the lone wolf in this pack? I am the lone wolf. I married someone whose mom was a nurse. So that was as close as we got. But no, both of my kids are in tech. And I couldn't even tell nursing stories. Like my husband is really interested in that. But I would tell nursing stuff at home. And my daughter would be like, ew, ew, ew, mom, stop. m And so I couldn't, yeah, I couldn't really go there. So I didn't pass on the, I didn't pass on. And when I have students and they're like, my mom's a nurse and she's going to pin me at pinning. It's like, oh, I wish that had been me. But you know what? My kids are both the most, two amazing humans. And I'm so happy that they are happy and doing things that really suit them well. So, you know, what I, what I, think I want is not really what I want. What I really want is for them to be happy and they are. exactly. And the only other thing I'd say about my husband is we are celebrating 40 years of marriage on June 1st. And yeah, and talk about things you thought would never happen in your life, right? So being married to the same person for 40 years, getting a PhD, life just has this way of surprising you. And em those 40 weren't always fabulous, you know, em that's life. That is the reality out there. But he is absolutely my best friend. And he's an engineer. So I call him an engineer nerd. And He teaches statistics actually to the DNP students at Gonzaga. So he and I actually, we actually teach a class together. So that's kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the risk of derailing the whole thing, I don't want to devalue what you did in the last 50 minutes here, but you mentioned this and I just, get this picture. Those that don't know me, maybe those that do, even those that do really don't know some of the little nuances. And one of the things that my grandmother used to do, we'd go visit one of the prominent graveyards here in Spokane. And the idea, typically it was to visit her. had a very young baby brother who died and we'd go to the grave site and all the things. But then she'd walk us around Green Bluff. um for those that, if you ever visit Spokane and you're into that sort of thing, go visit Green Bluff. But I'm digressing. The whole reason why I bring this up is because that fostered in me a love of doing that sort of thing. And oftentimes if I have a difficult thing I need to pray about or I need to work through, I will go to a graveyard and I'll go walk around. And it's the... It sounds morbid and morose. That's not anything about that. But what I've loved and I've brought my kids to a particular graveyard in particular as well, just and so they have some fond memories as well. But one of my favorite things to do when I'm at a graveyard and you're contemplating life's things and all things, you can't help but think about death, right? You're surrounded by death. Right. you look at these gravestones and I get choked up. I have this idea for this. I had this long ago when I was younger, a fictional book series or stories or something all about that dash, the hyphen that's in between the birth date and the death date. And that tiny little dash, I'm hearing your rich nursing career and that's just one iota of your life. Then you expand that on, my husband and I are celebrating 40 years of. 40 years of marriage, you guys, 40 years of marriage. That's marriage. That doesn't include what came before. it's all of that in a tiny little dash. And obviously your dash is still being written and all the things. But I just, I encourage anyone, if you've got a moment in your free time as a nursing student or as a nurse, if you're working, go visit your local graveyard. It sounds crazy. But when you go A, that's so peaceful and B, look at those gravestones. You you see the kid ones and it obviously makes you sad and you know, lives that are quote unquote cut short and or these lives that they're here for a long, long time. have military gravestones. You've got this and there's some little bit of story on their gravestone. But I just think, man, what kind of life do they live? What did they see? What did they deal with? You know what I mean? I love doing the same thing. It's funny that you say that. I love going to graveyards. I always have. And I think you're right. It is basically a place full of stories and you get a little snippet on their gravestone and then it's like, wow. And then, and I just, I also love just the beauty of looking at the stones and graveyards are usually in beautiful places. So to me, yeah, it can be a very contemplative kind of place and it's a great place to go and just think about your life, right? Like, are you doing what gives you joy? And are you, and if you're not, you know, are you doing something for a season or are you doing something for a particular, to reach a particular goal? Right? Like, I mean, you've been in grad school, I've been in grad school. There are times when it is just not fun, just like, and You know, to, but those things are worth doing, right? And then, and then they just, they launch you in a new, they give you new opportunities and take you in new directions. And I just think that's what education does. And that's why I love it so, so much. And I've been an educator long enough now to have students that are now faculty teaching. wow, that is just wild. and of such a huge privilege, right? Like my ability to affect people as a nurse and especially as a nurse educator is just, it's magnified by teaching because I teach you guys and then you guys go out, take care of all these patients. And then maybe at some point you become nurse educators or your preceptors or whatever. That just, I'm just hoping that there's a little tiny kernel of me. in what you do, right? And that is just hugely fulfilling for me. It is by far, hands down, the best job ever. So, for me. 100%. 100%. And we're gonna dive into that here in the second episode. This is a perfect segue. So I know we've already talked a bit and you've listened to a bit. You're not gonna wanna miss the second one. In my mind, I think there's only two questions I get to ask her because I feel like both of those are gonna cover her second episode. So come in. Listen to these two questions that we're about to ask because I think, feel like we're gonna be, yeah, I'm not even gonna just come right into the flip side of the Chris Sloan experience and we're gonna catch you on the flip side. You ready to go, Chris? would be the first name last name experience. So you got the first name experience, now we're gonna dive into the last name experience. Well, so now that we're, we'll just put it out right here. Now that you're a two-parter, if it's alright with you, that flub that we just talked about, that'll be in the intro of the second episode. Done deal, so now you guys get to hear it actually happen. Alright, catch you on the flip side. Okay.