OT

And it is truly the best thing I've ever done. My new job is absolutely amazing and I could go on and on about how the opportunities this job and this career path have to offer far surpass anything I would ever get in the rehab world. In every single way and in every single aspect of my professional and personal life. I hate that I feel this way though. I hate that I spent thousands and thousands of dollars that I will have to continue to pay back for years to come on a career that was nothing like what it was made out to be as a student. I have been and will continue to be in therapy for a long time working on forgiving myself for that. I know SO many people who feel the same way and are early in their career and are feeling so burnt out. My mission is now encouraging others to take the same leap of faith I did and leave the clinical world. And to help employers see what valuable employees former therapists are. I have already started and am having success.

It took me over a year, over 100 applications, more rejection and tears than I have ever experienced and I was in such a terrible place mentally and hoped to either get out of OT or no longer be alive.

If only I knew then what I know now.

In the last 3 years I have witnessed absolutely horrific and inhumane things as well as a disturbing amount of Medicare fraud in multiple nursing homes. And nothing done about it at all when you report clear abuse and neglect and refuse to play into the insurance fraud game and stand up for our clinical judgement and our profession. And the vast majority of people I talk to who have experience in nursing homes have eerily similar stories. I spoke to a professor about my experiences in nursing homes and she minimalized my experience and said that was absolutely not the norm. I don't believe her. I believe my coworkers and friends who have actually lived these experiences.

I don't work in a nursing home now, I work in acute care. I dont love it. I don't even really like it most days and I have a lot of coworkers at a large hospital system and so many of them few the same. I go around all day and have people refuse to get out of bed and be unkind to me when I go out of my way to try to be kind and helpful to them. I don't know what it is.

I've interviewed and applied to so many positions and been met with an attitude that is really offputting at a lot of them. Oh, you don't have the exact experience we are looking for and therefore you would require more training than we would prefer to provide.

I have been applying to other jobs in other fields. I have a plan and am actively working with a career coach to leave the field and the attitude in other fields is just so different and a welcome change. Like, ok you are smart and have some good skills that we are looking for and we can teach you the rest and you have a lot of potential.

I don't even know what the point of this post is. I can't put into words how all consuming and devastating it has been for me to not only have lost myself in a career that turned out to be the complete opposite of what I hoped, but to owe a large sum of money in loans for a career that is honestly nothing like what it was made out to be in school. This has negatively impacted every relationship in my life and caused me so much stress that I wasn't able to keep food inside of me or sleep for a period of time.

I had a patient in his 90s, totally with it, retired physician and professor of medicine. He told me about how much the field has changed since he retired and it made me so sad.

I've been working as an OT for 3 years now and I am not even close to being the same person. I feel like a shell of who I once was.

And when I say first day, I really do mean fresh out of school and very first day as an employed adult with a graduate degree. The only job I could find was at a SNF, but I was still excited to get a real paycheck and to use the skills I learned in school as a full fledged OT and I had no plans for staying longer than a year.

So I arrive at work, and the very nice rehab manager who I had been corresponding with for about 2 months prior was nowhere to be found and she hadn't answered any of my messages. I was then informed that she was fired. I later found out that she was fired because she refused to falsify documents and commit fraud like the director of nursing demanded that she do.

So instead there was a corporate manager who showed up and couldn't have cared less that I had never used that particular documentation system before and just in general was a new grad and was told I would be receiving training. I was handed a laptop and told that I need to evaluate an admission who was Med A as soon as possible. So I went in there and figured it out and did the evaluation and then the manager told me that I absolutely cannot take that long to do an evaluation and that it it killing productivity. At this point I was ready to walk out. The only reason I stayed was the COTA who had been there for 10 years convinced me to stay and that this corporate woman would be gone soon and that she and the other assistants would stand up for me.

I'm still friends with the COTA 2 years later and I call her "work mom" even though I don't work there anymore, and I've celebrated thanksgiving with her and her family when I couldn't go home to see mine. So I am grateful for her, but working in that building didn't ever get much better and PDPM killed the job market so I literally had nowhere else to go for months even though I applied to every single job that was posted for about 8 months. I left without securing another job because it got so bad. My family was willing to cover my expenses until I found something else because they saw that place absolutely suck the life out of me and that I was near needing to be admitted to a medical facility for the stress I was under.