Nursing is a shitty job. Literally. You work your fucking butt off every day. You are given an impossible task to do and therefore, always fall short in accomplishing it. Its like banging your head against the wall. Every day. You can't do what you are "supposed" to do, but you keep coming back every day anyway.
We let people treat us like shit every day: patients, doctors, management and do nothing about it. We go along with a management that tells us that we have to put up with rude, abusive behavior from people and not complain about it. They tell us thats just part of the job and we believe them.
We work for shitty wages. You might object and say: I don't know what you are complaining about, I mean you can do this job with a 2 year degree and make a decent wage...I don't care if we only had to go to school for 6 months, we don't make enough fucking money people! For what we have to do, put up with, the responsibility we have, the hours we have to work, are you fucking kidding me? If you think that you make enough, you are demonstrating my original hypothesis of codependency.
The vast majority of people would never be a nurse. Because they are normal. Normal people would never put up with this job. The first person who called them a bitch, they would be out the door. A normal person is not going to bang their head against the wall on a daily basis. Most people don't want to clean up shit and vomit for a living and they don't want to do it at 2:30 in the morning while everyone else is sleeping.
Now I can just hear some of you saying, oh but nursing is so rewarding, you can help people, blah blah blah. True. But lets be honest with ourselves, most of the job sucks. Thats the harsh reality most of us don't want to admit. Someones got to do this job, boys and girls. We keep banging our heads. That won't change anytime soon.
23 comments:
Preach it! I just wish I'd known the truth before I started on this career path... Off to look for a phone triage job! At least then I won't have to smell puke, see naked people, & deal with death all of the time.
My staff of nurses fron 0400 Monday until 1300 Monday in the ER was as pleasant an experience as it can be. They were knowledgable, caring, competent-preempting my medicine needs, attentive despite the place being overrun by 0800.
Thank you to all who worked with me and my husband during this unexpected trip to your bailiwick.
Well I started looking at this blog because it seemed interesting, and because I'm a nursing student. Now I'm already tired of this blog because all it seems to focus on are the crappy aspects of the job. You could be unemployed and with out benefits like many people I know. But instead you seem to enjoy having a pretty decent job and complaining about it every chance you get. If you hate it so much go find another job....
Anonymous @ 9:10
Remember that you are reading a blog. Most nursing blogs are written with the purpose (stated or not) of venting. No one ever said you have to read this. If you find yourself not liking it go read something else. Or wait a few years till you have been in the business some and see if you may not agree. Having been a nurse for almost ten years I found myself nodding right along with this post.
I am grateful for my employment but still find reasons to gripe. That is part of what makes it a job. Not a walk in the park or trip to Disneyland.
Sometimes you have a bad shift and need to rant. Give her a break...
anonymous #1
Talk to me when you have actually been a nurse for a while. Bye Bye
No thanks.
anon 9:10, you will thank this kind of blog one day, Good Luck!
Maybe it's time to retire. Even (maybe especially) the best people can get burned out.
You hit the nail on the head with this post! Even nursing after only one year, this is the reality, wait till that nursing student sees what it is really like. Nursing is not what I thought it was that is for sure!! But at least we can find humour in these stories, and laugh about it!! Great blog!!
This is so true! I've been an ICU nurse for a year and probably would have thought the same way that anonymous nursing student does before I started. Today a patient (not even mine) came out of his room and said to me "can I ask you a question" to which i said "sure but im not sure i will have the answer" he went on to yell at me about the neosporin he had asked for yesterday for the head of his penis and how i was an incompetent idiot and can anything get done right around this place!?!
Im thankful for my job but its times like this when i want to walk out the door and never look back.
You're all over paid crybabies....
Amen!....she/he sounds like a miserable person no matter what the job...its sickening!
Well, when her whole blog is bitching, obviously she has issues....is it ALL the people around her or....is it her? I know what my vote is!
Signed,
Nurse of 12 years
The physical labor sucks, and the abusive patients (though I haven't had any trouble being assertive with them without it coming to blows), but as for the shit and vomit, it's only shit and vomit. Easier than pulling on fat people. Suck it up, princess. :)
(continued)
...except, of course, when you have to pull on fat people to get to the shit.
Well if you so called caring professionals don't like your damn jobs, go find a new one. The only thing stopping you is yourself. Or the fact you like to bitch about your job and seem glorified. My aunt is a nurse practitioner and has been for over fourth years. She loves her job. And she cares for her patients. She works in a hospital too not a clinic. If you can't love your job then why do it? We should all do jobs we love. Then they aren't so much of a bitch. Like all of you.
Bitch? And yor nurse is an np. Ha! No fat pulling poop scooping for her. She just gets a real nurse yo do it
Oh, gee, don't you just love those high and mighty Flo Nightingale nursing students. What a PITA they are, because they don't know nothing yet, but it doesn't stop them from preachin'. I was a RN student for 1 year of a 24-month program. In that one year, I observed exactly what was stated in "the elephant in the room." I voluntarily quit, precisely because I thought the field of nursing really has some screws loose, starting with the way that students are flogged into the ground with useless crapwork that keeps them too tied up to actually study.
And I never had a patient on a clinical that wasn't some kind of poorly-educated lower-socioeconomic person that I had absolutely nothing in common with. My fellow RN students were from mostly low blue-collar backgrounds, had bizarre tattoos, and were not what I'd call middle class professional class, either. The RN instructors were all mommy-women, and I'm a child-free divorced college grad from engineering and science, where it's pretty rare to not have an entire department of co-workers were all of the gifted class in HS and tops in their college degree programs.
I finally decided that I could not deal with all of the culture shock. That particular nursing school attracted a lot of the same types of people as those that go into policework. It also attracted a lot of "nontraditional students" who were so counter-culture or so gritty that I never wanted to get mixed up with or too friendly with any of them. Certainly, I had nothing in common with the people I was in class with, on the floor with, or that were assigned to me as patients. Obviously, I was the misfit, LOL! I was the one who was so appalled by the real RN world that I gave up my dream.
What sticks in my mind most about that 1 year in RN school was how thrilled I was to start, and how relieved I was to bolt out of that smarmy alternate universe of being treated like dirt by EVERYONE, and go back to the white collar business and technical egalitarian world where feminism told them all decades ago: "Eff off; We don't fetch you coffee anymore."
Thank you to all of the nurses who put up with the crap hours, the crap people, and the additional work and demands that are constantly being heaped on your profession! You do a job I could not and will not ever do.
17 years in nursing, yep agree what a fucking waste of my life. I wish to God I could have my time back. As a nurse your a fucking nothing, shit on their shoe. For me nursing ranks as one of the worst jobs in the world. Two thirds of nurses want out, for the rest too late and waiting for retirement. I'm out and no one talks to me like I'm a piece of shit know. If you think I am wrong go and ask the staff out there.
Nursing is a field that uses it's employees to the max and gives them nothing in return. Many hospitals try to give focus to their mission statements of caring and nurturing when all the asshole CEO's and management staff care about is how much work they can heap on one nurse and how much not to give the patients in optimal care. Bottom line, it's not about the patient or the nurse it's about corporate greed. The insurance companies are in bed with hospital heads and nobody gives a fuck about the common person.......eg worker or patient.
Take a look at this blog: all the reasons you made a wrong career choice
http://justsaynotonursing.wordpress.com
I will say that I have been an icu nurse for 6 years. a med surg nurse for 8 years, an emergency room nurse for 4 years and a traveling nurse for 3 years. I can tell by some of these comments that many of them are completely ignorant of the profession, some naïve , some envious of our perceived salaries and some just plain designed to illicit a negative response due to some sadistic pleasure seeking motive. The phrase " never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes" applies. There are things you cannot imagine that happen in this field until you actually work it. For instance, did you know that most male nurses are thought to be homosexual. If not then your "sensitivity" is in question. Also did you know that because I am a male every petit and frail and weak nurse seeks you out to help lift or pull a heavy patient. so multiply that by twenty one years on a daily basis and tell me what your back feels like. by the way if you refuse to help them ,your not a "gentleman" . someone who sits back and tells someone else how to do their job is like an armchair quarterback. get off your probably overweight duff and play the sport then talk...
Nurse of 15 years here. And I am not at all shocked to find this blog and many others strewn all over the internet. Emotional regulation is a key component of what is going on here. I hate to say it. There will be lots of haters I know but, whatever. I have had ups and downs, sure, but if you don't watch what you think, how you think and ESPECIALLY who you decide to talk and relate to then --- WARNING, you will become a shaded, bitter nurse who hates her job but can't quite find the courage to quit because otherwise she wouldn't have anything to direct her self-hatred at. What nurses do is very needed, very important and as far as most national surveys go, is actually quite a respected profession. The problem is that it IS emotional labour. They should give courses in emotional regulation and other such courses because most nurses and dreadfully unprepared and-or fall in with such a negative crowd that they don't stand a chance. I could go on and on, and those who don't get just won't get it. Good luck everyone. And please, if you are this angry and can't get over it, then please just leave the profession. I for one, do not want you anywhere near my mother.
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