#scribbles rants

Work is hard, so so ridiculously hard at the moment. I know it’s the same for everyone since Covid, but that doesn’t make how hard I’m finding it invalid right now, ‘Kay? Nobody else gets to come in and say ‘yeah but the doctors have it harder’. We’re fully booked up to three weeks in advance, we get emergencies in every single day. Some weeks I do a solid 60 hours straight, which in an already high pressure job is a lot. I’m burned out, I’m tired, I don’t have the energy to do anything outside of work.

I want to write and knit and bake and go out (where I can at least). I spend my occasional days off and my evenings recovering though, trying to switch off from the patients I’ve seen that day and not think about how they’re doing later that evening.

I call it the nurses curse... caring too damn much about the patients and not enough about myself to turn off at the end of the day.

It’s a problem in all aspects of my life.

But I don’t think I’d change it.

The worst bit about work right now? Someone got tested positive for Covid.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be bothered about it. Perhaps if she hadn’t have gone travelling no only around the country but around EUROPE on her weekends I wouldn’t have minded so much.

If she’d have taken some sick leave instead of coming into work with a sore throat I might not have been as bothered. If she hadn’t have then flown to Europe for a long weekend and then come home having lost her sense of taste and smell I’d have perhaps been a bit more relaxed about it. I might have known then if she’d have picked it up somewhere local or whilst she was away.

Maybe if she hadn’t have gone off all over the place I wouldn’t be worrying that I’m carrying Covid asymptomatically and risking passing it on to my asthmatic brother.

Maybe I wouldn’t have had to cancel my staycation in Norfolk. Maybe I wouldn’t have missed out on that job interview I was looking forward to.

Instead I’m being forced to make use of a weeks holiday without being able to do anything. I’m stuck at home with my family for a week, feeling like I should be self isolating JUST IN CASE whilst all my colleagues are being forced to continue work regardless of the fact that one of our team could well have passed it on to us.

WHERE IS THE COMMON SENSE????

Close the practice for a damn week until we KNOW that none of the rest of us are showing symptoms. The patients and their owners can go to another branch if it’s an emergency and routines can just goddamn WAIT. Because I could not live with myself if I passed it on to the sweet old lady that brings her dog in for a weekly weigh in, or the pregnant member of staff caught it and got seriously sick.

See, there’s that curse again, I don’t care if I get sick... but what about literally EVERYONE around me??

I know there’s places that have it worse.

But that doesn’t make it any easier for me right now.

Why oh why can’t people just have common sense?