Claiming my Inner Bitch

New Job, Blue Job

Well, I'm officially a member of the nursing team at THAC*. I started nursing orientation yesterday and have spent the past two days largely glued to a less-than-ideally-comfortable chair struggling to keep awake. I had wondered whether taking the 3-11 position was the right choice but after getting in to orientation at 8 AM for two days, I think I realize I am not a day shift person. Too rebellious and off-kilter, I think. Or just too loud-mouthed.

Anywho, everyone I've met so far seems very pleasant and relatively happy. I hope this is someplace I can be happy to be a nurse again for a while, until I figure out what I want to do next. I wish I could say I was excited about the job but I'm really very ambivalent about it. My last place of employ left a really bitter taste in my mouth. I realized today that the reason my ex-hospital wore me down so much is because so many of the nurses there are burnt out! It's so infectious! God, I had started to hate the withered husk I'd become as a nurse there. Nope, time to move on.

I'm trying hard not to focus on how provincial this hospital seems to me. I'm a snob about great health care, I hate to say. When I graduated nursing school, and got done taking the summer off and spending every spare moment on a beach at the Jersey shore with my 4 year-old, I never even considered applying at any of the several community hospitals within a reasonable drive from my home. Not me...I went to the two regional referral hospitals in the poorest city in South Jersey.

The first one, the Catholic hospital, wanted to place me in Labor and Delivery. I wasn't comfortable with moving directly from nursing school to a specialty area, whether I'd passed my boards already or not. It disturbed me that they would want me to work in a specialty area with absolutely no experience in health care outside of nursing school. Mmm, no thanks.

The second place had an open position on a Gyn-Gyn Obcology floor. This unit happened to be the 'overflow' unit for the hospital as well. We also housed the VIP rooms. This meant we took patients from other areas of the hospital and other specialties so I had exposure to geriatrics, diabetes, all types of female abdominal surgery, mastectomies and thoracic surgery, pulmonary and adolescent patients...you name it, we got it if it wasn't a monitored, very young or critically ill patient. And the patient population was about 95% female.

Does that sound like the perfect nursing unit or what?

Guess which job I took.

So I've run the gauntlet of three inner-city hospitals over the past 22 years (really, three in the past five years) and now I find myself smack in the middle of lower-middle to middle-class, tree-lined suburbia.

And everybody's smiling.

It's scaring me.

I'm sure to find some other nasty, odd, snarky, crude, brutally honest, cynical, raunchy, bombastic, sarcastic bitches in the ER tomorrow.

God, I hope so. I require the company of a few of my kind!

So, it's back in tomorrow 'days' to meet the crew, 'days' next week then the drudgery of five evening shifts a week begins.

posted by Cheryl @ 7:55 PM