Tana Flies

I think maybe persistence to a fault. That work ethic was ingrained in me as a child growing up on the farm. I also have a little bit of scarediness, being humbled enough to know that things are over me all the time, there's power over me, so I'm respectful and afraid, minding my P's and Q's, trying to cross my T's and dot my I's as much as possible. I listen to my inner voice. In college, I would have really hard questions but I'd be embarrassed to say them in front of the whole class with 500 people, so I would go to the professor's office hours and ask my questions there. I'm so glad I did because it opened up my eyes to the solutions. I would always take advantage of office hours anytime they had the open door for me. I keep asking questions of my authorities to see what I'm supposed to be doing every day, making sure we're on the same page about everything.

When I was in the Air Force, one of my supervisors told me, don't let the Air Force, don't let the government use you, you have to use the government. They're gonna use you no matter what, they'll run you dry and not care. So what are you gonna do? I decided I'm gonna let them use me those hours, but after that, I'm off and I'm going to school. I'm getting more education, I'm gonna build my knowledges, always increase knowledge. It takes money, but that money will come back to you and triple and quadruple fold eventually. It's always worth it increasing your knowledges. The more you know, the more you find out you don't know. My supervisor told me to get my GI Bill, get my education, because the military likes to move people around too much where you don't get to sit there and do your degree. The government will run you into the ground till you die and they don't even know it. So you might as well get your education, build that retirement fund, build you a retirement on your own. Don't wait for your employer to invest in you, because they will not. They're investing in themselves. They are replacing you with the next one. So let's go, let's try to take care of you. That's the advice I got from my higher-ups, and now I'm saying the same thing to the younger people.

I would say just keep putting one step in front of the next, keep going. Don't let the negative people get on you too much, because they're always there agonizing. Just be able to throw that off of your shoulder, swipe it. My grandmother used to say, the little devil's gonna be on your shoulder every minute, every day. You just gotta swipe him off and listen to the other shoulder with a good angel on it. That's what I do, I'm fighting off the bad angel and listening to the good angel. I'm swiping that bad one off and just keep going. Let the negativeness go, and try to keep breathing, and just keep going forward, and doing the best that you can.

Science is taking a hit right now. The laboratory science, the clinical lab science, all this is science-based with the research and the FDA, and everything's a little broken in healthcare. Actually, it's big broken, not just little, it's big broken, and it's getting more broken. Everybody's confused - the doctors, nurses, the billing people, the owners of these poor hospitals. We have this Hippocratic oath where we want to save lives, we want to help people, we have the right mentality. But sometimes these pharmacies and pharma and billing and stuff like that make us not be able to behave in a nice, caring way like you'd want to. We're understaffed, overworked, dealing with burnout, overtime, extra hours, after duty hours. I mean, not on call, but you still have to live within 30 minutes so you can come and be at work within a certain time frame. All these things don't go into account, and they're not reimbursed most of the time. When you take a job somewhere, you're really tied to that community.

I think just the human dignity values are what I have. I have mission and core values that I learned over the years in the Air Force, but personally, just the core values. You gotta keep your dignity, you want to be able to take care of yourself. I've helped older nursing home patients feel like they can care for themselves. They don't want you to do everything for them, they need their independence. I think it's just letting people be independent and help them take care of things they can take care of, and then what they don't have a capacity to help themselves with, be right there to help them. Dignity is what it's called, help people just keep their dignity. A lot of people have different ways they like to be treated. It's not treat others as you want to treat yourself, you have to watch how they treat themselves and treat them like that, because not everybody would treat themselves like I would treat myself. You have to turn around and be like, okay, they have different culture. Being open-minded, being able to coexist with people that have different cultures and traditions and habits and routines, and be able to help them as well whenever they need help and understand, not overstep.