Travel nurse aims to make a difference

Sharon McLane’s life goal is to make a difference. And she has and continues to do so in her so-called retirement.
She continues to work as a traveling nurse manager, sometimes close to home for short periods and as far away as in Alaska for four months during the COVID-19 shutdown.
She grew up in Greenbush in the northwest corner of Minnesota, went to Northland junior college, first earning her licensed practical nurse degree and then an associate degree as a registered nurse. She worked at the Greenbush 15-bed hospital and was later the associate director of nurses at the nursing home.
“It was a great experience. I did all kinds of nursing,” she said in a recent interview. The work prompted her to further her education, particularly for management. She earned her Bachelor of Science Nursing (BSN) degree from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks while working full time, raising three sons and commuting to the campus, 90 miles away.
“Classes weren’t at conventional times but were in the evenings and weekends I worked at Greenbush from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., changed, drove 90 miles and went to class from 4 to 9 p.m. and then drove home,” she said.
After graduating in three years, she worked as the director of nursing at the Roseau Nursing Home. Her then husband took a job in Dodge Center and the family moved to Kasson. She worked as a director of nursing at a nursing home in Rochester and then at the Zumbrota Health Care Center and nursing home before taking a job in Owatonna with Allina. The hospital then was on Cedar Street.
She worked as an assistant patient care supervisor in labor and delivery and mental health units. And then was the nurse manager in all the in-patient units, medical and surgery, respiratory, intensive care, labor and delivery. The new hospital off 26th Street was built and moved into and the hospital changed from paper to computer records. In 2015, for a change, she said, she took the job as the Koda Nursing Home, the Benedictine Living Community director of nursing.
She retired in 2018 but retirement didn’t last 30 days. At her retirement party, she volunteered to be in a movie “Under the Stadium Lights” made in Owatonna and starring Lawrence Fishburne. She played a patient wearing an oversized patient gown with filming from Friday to Monday. Her scene was cut and only her hand appears in the movie.
Benedictine Health System asked for her help in Bismarck, N.D.
“I said I could help,” she said, and that was the start of her traveling nurse manager work. Her husband, Rudy, stayed home with the dogs.
That first job lasted five months. She then was at Timberdale Trace in Owatonna, in LaCrescent, and back to Timberdale. When Clinical Resources, the agency that supplies needed help, called her about a four-month job in Alaska, she said yes.
“I really wanted to see Alaska,” she said. “I told them, sure, why not, but I didn’t ask where I would be working.”
It turned out to be Kotzebue, in the Arctic Circle, on the Bering Strait on the Bering Sea. She was there from mid-July to October. (See accompanying story).
Alaska wasn’t the end of her traveling nurse manager times. She continues to go out on assignment, just recently on a short –term assignment in St. Peter. She also holds interim positions, often as the director of nursing before the permanent staff arrives.
“I grew up wanting to be a nurse. Health care has gotten so massive and there is so much to learn. Nursing is much more specialized than when I started.”