NEW YORK NURSE: April 2010
by Randi Hoffman
Roni Aizigov was working as an equity trader on Wall Street when he began to think about his future in 10 to 15 years.
“One day I was making unbelievable money and the next day I was losing unbelievable money. It was always up and down. It’s educated gambling,” Aizigov said. “I was worried about my economic stability, and with what happened to the economy, I was right.”
So Aizigov returned to school and earned an associates degree from Kingsborough Community College and a BSN from St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. Now he works in the ICU at Kings County Hospital Center, where he was hired in November of 2008.
While at Kingborough Community College, he also met his wife, who is now an RN at Maimonides Medical Center, working in the PICU, NICU and pediatric departments. They have an eight-month-old baby.
Aizigov was born in Israel, and came to Brooklyn when he was very young. His parents emigrated to Israel from Azerbaijan, a country on the Caspian Sea north of Iran.
He started working at Kings County because of the level of experience he could gain, and because he had friends already working there. “The nurses at Kings County were great at welcoming the handful of new graduates, myself among them, into the facility,” he said. “Kings County is known for its high-acuity-adult special-care units. I don’t believe I would have had a better experience anywhere else.”
Aizigov wrote an article for the Kings County Hospital Center newsletter about whether recently graduated nurses should be working in the ICU. He spoke about how his previous work experience had taught him how to handle stress, and that he was grateful for state-of-the-art knowledge and experience of the nurses surrounding him.
Comparing the two, Aizigov said both finance and nursing are very stressful and very rewarding. But Aizigov seems to thrive on working in the ICU.
He said, “I like that you get to focus on a few patients, and really think about their body’s response to medications. . . .while making someone money will make them happy, nothing compares to the feeling of watching someone who was near death make a full recovery.”
Aizigov plans on continuing his studies by becoming a nurse anesthetist. Beginning in May, he will be enrolled at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island School of Nurse Anesthesia Program.