Nurse Stories

Tracy Gideon

Director of Staff Development
LVN

To Tracy Gideon, being a nurse and becoming a nurse are two entirely different things.

Tracy has always wanted to be a nurse. When she was a child, her mother was an RN at a local VA hospital, and Tracy often joined her at work and talked to the patients she met. The experiences proved inspiring for her.

When she turned 18, Tracy became a CNA, but around the same time she also got married and started a family – having five children in all, to be exact. While nursing remained in her heart, and she longed to be an RN like her mother, she also understood that she now had other priorities to focus on.

Despite this, Tracy set a professional goal for herself: To be an RN by 2012.

At age 27, she entered an LVN training program, which took three years for her too complete – no easy feat considering she was juggling a full-time position and a family life at the same time. Soon after, she enrolled in a series of RN prerequisite courses – 16 in all – which took her another three years to finish.

After that, she applied and was accepted to Fresno State’s “Bridge Program,” a program that helps LVNs become RNs. She completed the coursework in nine months and now expects to become a RN in the coming year.

“I love the challenges of nursing,” she says. “I love taking care of people. I like dealing with the families. In long term care, the families and the residents become a part of you. This is half of your life. Eight waking hours, you’re dealing with staff, residents and family members. I like to make them happy, make sure that things are being done correctly.”

Tracy has been an LVN since 2003, and over the years she has been a nurse in a variety of settings, including a handful of LivingCenters, a community hospital and even a prison. She has been an LVN and Director of Staff Development at Golden LivingCenter – Sanger since 2006. In this position, she works closely with her LivingCenter’s safety committee and infection control practitioner, provides care to residents, offers clinical education to staff and patients, and works closely with her facility’s CNAs.

In addition, when she was still a CNA, she and four coworkers wrote the Golden Living CNA Handbook. “We picked certain sections and went over that,” she says. “We were involved in deciding what content would be in the book. I consider it a major accomplishment.”