I’m going to sound like a bad nurse but this is my blog and I’ll whine if I want to. I’m officially on disability now because I cannot do bedside nursing with the constant debilitating exhaustion, nausea, vertigo, and pain caused by long covid. But now that I’m out of bedside in-patient nursing, I’m never going back. I may technically be a public health nurse, but The Public can sit and spin, I’m fucking done working with y’all, sorry.
As a nurse, you’re literally the punching bag for everyone in the hospital. I’ve been assaulted more times than I count and my only recourse is to shake it off. The US healthcare system puts nurses in the position of being blamed for everything while also having absolutely no control over those things.
You will get blamed and get extra work for any safety issues you point out. It’s your fault if you get punched in the face because you didn’t follow the assigned safety education module exactly. Any changes to any processes have to go through committee after committee before they come back and end up amounting to extra work for nurses. Every day amounts to trying to provide care in the face of all the administrative, micromanaging BS, and only kinda being able to do so. Every fucking day is moral injury after moral injury just watching American healthcare ruin people’s lives routinely. My body and mind are literally falling apart from covid and years of physical labor, and I just can’t any more.
