The workday, part 5: Editorial

Overall, I really like my job. The previous posts may suggest otherwise, and accordingly I am starting with the good aspects of my work.

Why my Job is Great

1. I work 3 days a week.


2. I get to help people and I get to interact with my patients and their families.


3. My patients are generally nice people who are in the hospital to fix a problem, not put there by bad luck or circumstance.


4. My coworkers are good to work with. I like them and I even socialize with a few of them outside of work.


5. I have a good manager. My charge nurses are also excellent.


6. I work only part of a Saturday every 6 weeks or so, and never on Sundays.


7. I know what I'm doing.


8. About once every two weeks, I get to come home early


9. There are downtimes. I actually have time to pee and to eat lunch (most days).


10. I get to know the doctors and their teams. I generally like all of them, too.


11. There's a little bit of excitement every now and then.


12. Every once in a while I really help someone.


13. My employer offers good benefits.


14. My pay is decent.I could definitely live on it.

Challenges of my Job

Most of the issues I have with my job is the milieu of being a nurse. They are not specific to my unit - in fact, most hospital nursing has similar problems.

1. Work flow is unpredictable. I would like to partition my work out more evenly through the day, but experience has shown that this is very risky.


2. Despite our greatest effots, things all seem to happen at the same time and everything needs to be done right now.


3. Nurses are frequently caught in the middle between patient safety and demads of the job. Of course patient safety comes first, but in these situations, the cost is usually the nurse.


4. Sometimes people think you're not too bright if you're a nurse.


5. Nursing wants to be respected as a profession, but it continually is treated like (and acts like) a trade. This is partially the fault of the structure in which nurses work and partially the fault of nurses themselves. I don't know what the right solution is.


6. Nurses are expected to know everything and be good at everything.


7. Nurses are expected to read doctors' minds.....correctly.


8. Nurses are the front line of defense against mistakes. If the pharmacy makes a mistake, the nurse is supposed to catch it. If the doctor makes a mistake, the nurse is supposed to catch it. If the nurse doesn't catch it, the mistake is her fault.

My Personal Challenges

I have been dying to confess this, but I am afraid of the repercussions if I talk about it too much. The issue is this: I am not good at placing IVs. I have tried and tried. I have gotten feedback. I have spent one of my days off following the hospital's IV team to learn pointers. I cannot do it. I can hit the vein, but for one reason or another, I can't thread the catheter in the vein. I have been struggling with this for over a year. When I ask for feedback and have people watch me, sure enough, they can't find an obvious reason for my lack of success.

This is a big deal because we start IVs on all of our preps. I am confronted by it every single day.

It is wearing on my psyche. Several times, I have wept at work (briefly, in private) when I fail. I am frustrated and I hate hurting the patient with no gain in the end. It is beginning to wear me down...in fact, if we weren't short staffed on my unit, I might fear for my job. This is one reason why I don't seek more help at work.

In my defense, many, many of our patients are hard sticks (that is, difficult to place IV's in). They're dehydrated little old ladies with no veins - I'm generalizing, of course.

I don't know what God is trying to teach me with this challange. There has never been anything that I haven't been able to conquer (or at least, improve), with hard work, education, and practice. This seems not to be the case! I can only assume that God is trying to teach me something and I stubbornly won't learn it. Too bad I don't know what that something is....and because I believe God asked me to be a nurse, this is particularly troubling.

I fear that this challenge could be what does me in, in this job...that is, it will wear on me too much, and I'll move on to something that doesn't humiliate me every day.

Another challenge is the situation of a predominantly female work environment. Weird things happen when it's women only - cattiness, lack of understanding, too much food. I used to work in a male-dominated field, and it was so different. Not really better, just different....and since I grew up in that environment, I find the female world a little foreign.

These are my thoughts on work for now. I expect I'll have more in the future. On to other things in my next posts.