The Atlas Life

The Atlas Life #38 - Courtney Heuerman, Traveling ER Nurse

This week on The Atlas Life, we meet with ER travel nurse, Courtney Heuerman, currently finishing up an assignment in Springfield, Illinois.

Corey Anderson: I met Courtney, I believe it was early 2016 via Facebook. She had reached out with, I guess, questions about her first travel assignment. She's great. If I could clone her over and over again, I would. She understands the industry super well. Really easygoing, great personality. It's just been awesome to work with her. She loves dogs, she's a runner, loves to hike, just super active person. She did, I think it was a six month assignment over in Hawaii. I think it might be helpful if people kind of learned about our experience with her.

Courtney H.: My name is Courtney Heuerman. I am an ER nurse working in Springfield, Illinois right now. I've been working with Atlas for about two years. I met Corey... I just reached out on Facebook. I went to TravCon, and that's where I'd heard of Atlas. I had worked with a couple other companies. Wasn't super happy with the recruiters I'd been working with, so I reached out. Yeah, he got stuck with my case. Hit it off right away, so it was good. Travel nursing, for me, the biggest motivator has always been just to go places. I didn't travel a ton growing up, and from Omaha there's not a ton to do in the Midwest sometimes, so that was always a big motivator for me was getting out of Illinois.

Courtney H.: I started out on the East coast in Baltimore. I've got family out there, so I was in Baltimore. I came back, and then one in Springfield, Missouri. Just pretty similar to Springfield, Illinois, and then I ended up in Denver for six months and Maui after that, St. Louis, Illinois, and I headed to Mesa, Arizona for Christmas. The Maui one was different than any of the other ones. You have to be 100 percent flexible going to Maui. It was one of the best experiences I've ever had. I actually ended up finding housing, because housing's really hard to come by in, I think, all the islands. I ended up in someone's backyard in this little shed-looking thing. My mom was real excited when I showed her this, and I had a bed up in the loft. And I mean, it was like the size of a bathroom. I'm not even joking. It did have a toilet in the back. My shower was outside.

Courtney H.: That was my housing. For me though, all I needed was just a place to leave my suitcase. I didn't plan on hanging out inside a whole lot. Some people rent a car in Maui. It's pretty expensive. I found this old beat up car that I ended up buying for 1500 bucks that I drove around. And it works, sort of. My mom came to visit, and she came out for a week. We went up to Haleakala, which is the volcano, and it's decent elevation so it gets kind of cool up there. When she came, it was 32 degrees or something, 33 degrees by the time we got to the top, so she comes to Maui from Illinois and it's freezing. What I've enjoyed the most is all the visits that I have from friends and family. Some of my best memories as a travel nurse have been my parents come visit, my siblings come visit, and I've had a group of friends from home that we've been friends for 20 years. They came to visit me in Colorado.

Courtney H.: I think that's been probably the biggest part is giving people that I know and care about kind of the chance to travel too with me. Probably the most difficult part of it, really... I mean, I try not to get too worked up about this life. The housing stuff kind of gets old sometimes, but you've got to tell yourself it always works out. It always does. And probably like the modules and stuff that you have to do every assignment. Those get a little... After Mesa, I don't know for sure what I'll do, but I do know that at some point I want to be in Washington state. That's up there. And then I think Omaha, Nebraska. So hard to get jobs there. That's where all the travelers flock to. It always stays on the list, Omaha.

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