7p is what many in the field call the night shift. Brevity being key in healthcare, as evidenced by the many acronyms of medicine that I now get all excited about when I actually know them. I've worked nights this week, my last 3 days are tomorrow through monday night. Back to back to back darkness. If all goes well I'll emerge, like a mole, into the sunlight tuesday morning around 8:00 give or take, to go home, pass out and pray that I can avoid ever working the night shift again. I will gladly work weekends, holidays, hell I'll even skip lunch if I have to, I do it most days anyway, in order to not work the dreaded night shift. Because I am a lady whose circadian rhythms are firmly entrenched in being up at daylight and I do not like abusing my body and psychological well being this way. There is a $1/hr shift differential for working nights, meaning, woohoo you get all of $12-$13 extra for submitting your body to the abuse of a probable carcinogen. I don't know, maybe $10/hr extra would make it worth it for some, but even then I'd choose not to work nights because it makes me mental.
I'm still trying to figure out where I fit in in the world and sometimes it just doesn't seem like there's anyplace for me. I am an admitted control freak and there are so many things at work, little frustrations that take up time and so much energy. The veteran nurses agree that it's a pain in the ass but say you just have to ignore it or get past it. But I'm like why can't we fix this so it works properly? I just see the waste when you let things go, even little seemingly insignificant things. Like what you ask? Well there's a small frig that locks, it stores medications that need to be refrigerated and when I shut the door it doesn't catch, meaning lock, so I hear this insistent beepbeepbeep and try to shut it again. And again and again and still beepbeepbeep. The heat rises to my face and I start getting flop sweat (with the actor that made me love Broadcast News demonstrating it so well below). I ask other nurses what to do. Oh you have to really slam it, is their reply. So I do that, to the point that the frig moves and still beepbeepbeep. Do you know how fucking annoying that is when you have to give a patient vancomycin 3 times in a shift?! And because I am new and I am ssslow and the beepbeepbeep of the frig is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the obstacles I run into daily. Don't even get me started on how unintuitive and time consuming the computer charting is. Oh my. Hopefully I'll speed up in a year or two but this profession it's like, you're hired and then you're tossed into the deep end. I'm on orientation but it's so busy sometimes (all the time?) that my orientee doesn't really have time to sit and answer all my questions. It's like triage with the questions I can get answers to in a shift. And then I go home thinking, but I still don't know what to do about that or this and did I forget to chart that. It's maddening. I'm doing alright but there are such huge gaps in my knowledge and I am not okay with that. It terrifies me. Now, to be fair, I tend to see every goddamn thing I do wrong and very little that I do right and when I fuck up, even in a very minor, pretty insignificant way, it haunts me.
Another thing that haunts me. I get links from some nursing website through my email and one recently was an article about lucrative second jobs for nurses, because being a nurse doesn't always pay enough. Something I was unaware of in school but see on now that I'm working, I have met many a nurse working two jobs, which usually accounts for five or six 12 hour shifts, in order to make ends meet. And these nurses are older than me and I am flipping exhausted after my three 12 hour (really 13 hour) shifts. Good to know now that my student loans will be kicking in come May. And I still need to get a BSN and then hopefully an MSN, so I won't need a 'lucrative second job'. It's exhausting. The last time I went on vacation was in August of 1998. I went to Italy for a poetry workshop and had to come home early because I was sick- spiking fevers at night, I had no appetite (in Italy of all places!) and lost weight, had a rash and migrating arthritis. It wound up being lyme disease. Closing in on fourteen years without a proper vacation. Sure I've gone out of state for weddings or across the state to Kennett Square for the weekend of my 40th birthday but I'd like a week of mindless idleness under a warm sun where my raynaud's disease is kept in check and I can wear some sandals, take pictures of a different landscape, play with my kids and buy some souvenirs.
All that's missing is my pale body, plenty of sunscreen and a good book.
