Hectic Days, Too Short Nights

ER nurse Pro-choice, LGBTQ+, safe supply, land back Free Palestine

[kindness-not-weakness]

we had a good ed educator, which was awesome because this hospital has a pretty solid RN residency program and we do a lot of our own adjunct education

a year ago the hospital fired half the educators, including ours and now the position is posted again, which feels insulting

add on to that, management sent out an email asking staff to consider applying and one of them asked me specifically to apply. the email also asked us to refer friends who might be good to the position but why would any of us take that such a demonstrably unprotected position or refer a friend to it? the max salary is only slightly more than my base and there isn't any chance for ot

i like that it's a public hospital I like the people I work with and have actual friends there. i can't leave right now because of other things going on in my life but if I could I'd apply to a cool hiv outreach program

not today, maybe in the future

sticking around the ed for a while

[depsidase]

[fangirltothefullest]

[kindness-not-weakness]

Someone who i respect is going to recommend me to be charge here. I can't believe I've been at this godforsaken place(affectionate) for long enough that they know me well enough to see my flaws and STILL want me to captain this sinking ship

I wasn't supposed to stay in the ED, this was supposed to be a temporary landing zone. Now I am stuck i fear

Why is everyone here cool. I want to hate this place

[kindness-not-weakness]

i ripped a giant hoooooooollllleeeee into my hand

giant splinters will do that to you! toughing it out at work with dermabond to cover the gaping hole in my palm

[kindness-not-weakness]

the world is a giant ball of stress

but the hospital is...also a giant ball of stress

i suppose the difference is that the hospital stress is not, for the moment, hugely impacted by global stress

i do wish that guy would have a giant stroke & mi combo, i feel like it's due

[kindness-not-weakness]

cried today

after work, not because of the thing that happened, though it was awful and terrible, but from the aftermath of the emotional fallout

brought to you by another fucking MONDAY

[kindness-not-weakness]

TODAY

was a monday in the er

[kindness-not-weakness]

back in it

acls, tncc and nihss down, pals and a few more to come and recert season will be over

[kindness-not-weakness]

Ok.

I put in some time and effort and did the hard thing to drag myself out of bed early a few times to spend quality, quiet time with my dog in the morning. It's cool and it's damp and the people aren't around.

The sun looks very beautiful just coming up through the pines.

I forced myself into the fabric store and got a bunch of ends and am 2/3 of the way through what is going to be a really, really ugly skirt. The project is frustrating as hell, but it's frustrating bc I'm not familiar with my swing machine and I don't really know how to sew and so I'm bad at this new thing I'm learning.

I've said a few of the hard, sad things about my career and my confusion over what I want for the future to my partner. I can't make any changes right at this moment, but even acknowledging my uncertainty in that small way helped. I feel more settled and far less desperate.

I can take the time I need to make the next move, I don't need to jump from a ship that's on fire into shark infested waters.

None of us need to make those desperate decisions, but if you're done my friends, you're done. All of us should be taking the time to polish up our resumes, considering school, different career tracks or even changing out of healthcare altogether if we need.

We are a valuable and finite resource, be careful.

[kindness-not-weakness]

I am so overwhelmed. I cry almost every day on my way into work and while in theory, I love nursing, I keep googling variations of "what is an easy job". I don't want to leave the field but I'm still being asked to be creative about problem solving and see challenges as resource rich opportunities and I...am...tired.

I want to go home and have energy for projects that I'm enthusiastic about doing on my own time. I want to go home and be happy to cook food I like. I want to go home and NOT need to sit in a dark, quiet place just to feel like myself again with the impending doom knowledge that the sensation will disappear as soon as I wake up the next day to start it all over again.

I know we're all here and that only makes it worse.

[kindness-not-weakness]

True humor is in the facial expressions of all the nurses and techs at the nursing station who have just dumped a bunch of M&M's, skittles or popcorn into their N-95's and are munching away like horses w nosebags when management shows up unexpectedly at 5 am, declaring obnoxiously loudly, "Good morning!!! How's everyone doing, let's all get together for a quick staff meeting!"

[kindness-not-weakness]

I have not checked in here in a long time, since before the dreaded covid, but today I felt The Urge. I just stepped completely away from the ER and I only work in public health right now and I feel like I've lost a little of my identity.

I almost feel a little guilty quitting that job when so many can't work at all. But only almost. The stress of public health and emergency medicine together, while all this other shit is going on, pandemic, state and federal sanctioned murders of black people, continued purposeful destruction of native communities, a president who is determined to drag the entirety of the US down into a racist, gluttonous spiral of self destructive obliteration... We're mostly doing the best we can with what we have.

Every day, I'm looking for light and flashes of joy. Working in a substance use disorder clinic, most of my patients are homeless, many have had their children taken away or they have been cut off by their families, most have a series of disabilities that will prevent them from ever working regardless of sobriety. We enthusiastically celebrate very tiny victories here and we work to turn the tide even a small amount in favor of people who have received many short ends of many sticks.

In terms of numbers, it's not huge. But I am putting in the work where it needs to be and have purposefully taken a job where I am fighting, every single day, against that self destructive spiral.

This work is not why I became a nurse. That came from my own need to find a place I belonged. Life is a weird game of chance and like, there but for the grace of blah blah blah...

I'm glad my chance let me navigate myself to this place.

[kindness-not-weakness]

tfw you're a liberal unicorn snowflake and your arnp is so catholic she can't even listen to you say the word 'termination' to your patient without getting flustered but then you go into a detailed and in depth explanation of all forms of birth control and how important it is that your patients keep safe while homeless and addicted, going to great lengths to ensure they know pregnancy is something they can have control over

is a gud feel

[kindness-not-weakness]

Back in the ED for a per diem shift and....I made the right decision. It's nice to be back, working with my people and I got a great rectal foreign body story out of the shift, but at the same time I'm charge and we're short on staff. So I'll be taking patients and the drunk asshole in the room across from the charge desk is keeping up a running litany of 'fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou' and 'i want a woman can't you get me a woman' and then asking for a sandwich.

So yeah. I'm moving further away from the point where keeping up these skills feels important.

[kindness-not-weakness]

The look on that interns face when he had to Actually Talk to the ED RN's for the First Time... Priceless.

[kindness-not-weakness]

As of the end of the month, I am stepping out of the ED and into public health.

For the first time in my life, I'll be working business hours, with weekends and holidays off. After years of wearing what amounts to pajamas at work, I need an entirely new wardrobe.

I'm going to sorely miss my ED fam and our rowdy good times and 7 am beers after a rough shift. But I'm as excited for this next step as I was when I started in emergency medicine.

[kindness-not-weakness]

heyhey

like, try as hard as you can in your youth to develop effective and safe coping skills so you don't turn to drugs and alcohol and other self destructive tendencies when your life gets tough in your twenties