Why I left my last job...
Hey there, how’s it going? How it got to be the end of January already, I don’t really know. I hope you are well and easing into the year and flow and finding moments of quiet and peace and hope while staying warm under the covers. The days seem just a teeny bit longer and the sunsets have been beautifully visible at times when I’m leaving work - a few minutes of light as I walk out before its dark again. I’m still adjusting to a different work flow. Last year I took a job in a Medical Specialties Clinic, away from the Palliative Care Unit I had worked on since moving to Nashville in 2013. As I began my nursing career over 20 years ago, I never thought I’d work in a hospital at all, but I didn’t think I knew anything, so I started out on the Renal Floor at Doctor’s North in Victorian Village in Columbus OH. I learned so much and quickly moved along to ICU/CCU, accumulating knowledge at a fast rate and deeply grateful I could develop so many critical thinking skills centered around the human body. As time went on, I grew more and more experienced which led to more responsibility on the units and eventually training new nurses. This used to fulfill me and I always regarded nursing as a teaching profession.
Fast forward to now. I work in a clinic, which is still located in a hospital just yards away from where I worked my last job as a bedside nurse, but it feels like a whole other world. Not better or worse, just totally different. And I wonder sometimes what is going on over there but I also don’t. I walk a different path into the same building to help myself unlearn some of the thoughts I used to have before a difficult shift. I am still shaking off a lot of the traumatic things that happened while I was there and the subsequent exhaustion I still feel deeply in my cells at times. I think sometimes I miss parts of it a little bit, but then I remind myself of what became unbearable. And those little unbearable things weren’t what you might think. Death and blood were commonplace, and my compassionate script for those awful things non-nurses say ‘they could never do’ - well they can be learned. But the worst parts for me and what made me exit the bedside with no plan to return were difficult to pinpoint. It was a low hum of abusive behavior in the system that was like when a relationship just isn’t right for some reason but you can’t figure out why yet.
Taking a few steps back and reflecting on it, I feel like one of the worst things was that at some point the healthcare system stopped seeing people as whole. And therefore, its workers - the nurses, care partners, social workers, physicians, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, etc etc followed suit. Treating the ailment, ‘the appendectomy in room 5445’ or the 'stroke in 6852’ or even worse, the ‘frequent flyer who’s crazy in Pod C’ - we lost touch. It’s an ever evolving battle to see oneself as a whole person - especially when everything is a specialty, and primary care is harder and harder to secure, especially if you don’t have good insurance.
And I can’t even with insurance and what is and isn’t covered, and I don’t have the desire go down that rabbit hole, so I’m just gonna leave it alone.
So how do we go about finding wholeness on a more regular basis? It’s a question I am always asking, and I come to different answers all of the time. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty good physically, mentally and emotionally. A work in progress as always, I have found a lot of joy in living and one of the reasons is because I left the job that was killing me slowly. And I thought that job was the last job I would ever leave, because I had told myself I wouldn’t thrive anywhere else, despite the fact I wasn’t thriving. When my dear therapist told me ever so gently that I’d be leaving my position soon, I actually got ruffled up and upset, maybe even a little mad, and thought, Well, Sharon is wrong about that! ha, she was more right than wrong, that’s for sure.
Nursing is a teaching profession, no doubt about it. It continues to teach me more and more about myself day after day, year after year. I am still coming to terms with some of the experiences it has offered me, how it has bled into blurry boundaries into other parts of my life, how it still is the gift that keeps on giving. Nurses are here to assist people to finding the best version of ourselves, and we owe it to one another to continue such a quest for wholeness in each other. I’m still here for all of it.
Image by Laura Schneider