Inertia is a difficult thing to overcome. It can feel like pushing a loaded down wheelbarrow up a steep incline. The thing is, once you hit the peak, things move rapidly. In this vein, I applied for, was interviewed for, was offered and accepted, a new job in the span of 48 hours. After dozens of resumes and applications were sent out to disparate places with frequently no response, it happened just that fast. Why? Well........
If you have been reading this blog at all you know I hate my job. I have had many jobs in my life and I can certainly not attest to loving any of them. They are now, and will likely always be, necessary evils. Things I do because I need to eat, pay rent, and so on. I know this about myself. I work to live, not remotely the other way around. I would also be more than willing to lower my standard of living if it meant a corresponding reduction in my need to work. But I digress.
That said, I don't frequently hate what I do. Would I rather be reading a book on a beach with a tropical drink firmly ensconced in my right paw? You betcha. Would I also rather be cleaning the house, grocery shopping, or wiping down the interior of the car? Also strongly on the side of affirmative. However, are the health care jobs I have held, present company included, better than, say, working at a care facility bathing the dementia patients who no longer have control over their bowels or emotional states? Abso-freakin-lutely! There are many darker holes to climb out of to be sure. I sat in a climate controlled office bathed in fluorescent lighting with a headset atop my cranium with eyes forward perpetually affixed to the CRT in front of me. Many a worse fate has befallen many a better person than I.
I tried to figure out why I hated what I did. Why it made me feel the way it did. I tried to figure it out with a counselor, with Tia, with friends and family and on the pages of this blog. I can say without reservation that it had nothing to do with the people I worked with. The only one I did not care for left (and made many people in the clinic quite happy) and of those that remained I can say, at worst, I was ambivalent about them and, at best, I considered them friends that I would be more than happy to see outside of the confines of our clinic. They were a stellar group of generally upbeat individuals doing work that, from the doctors on down, paid them less than they were worthy of. I will truly miss most of them and hope to stay in touch.
I can also not largely say it was the patients who call. For the most part they are gracious and eager to hear anything that might make them feel better. They are calling at a low point physically and, like all of us when we are feeling that way, just looking to feel better. Sure, there are confrontations, the avidly over-calling anxiety junkies, and the straight up pill poppers looking to dull the pain of living away.
What I like to think is that it is the relentlessness of it all. The fact that around every corner and over ever hill is another expanse the likes of which you just traversed, like an MC Escher painting. Or perhaps it more like the sublimely funny Bill Murray movie Groundhog's Day, where the same day keeps happening again and again. There was never a beginning and and end to anything other than what the clock and calendar displayed. Mondays are the same as Fridays and July is the same as December because the calls never stop and they often don't even vary in content.
I also blame the chasm between expectation and reality. I was told, and naively believed, that I would have the opportunity to work closely with the doctors and, in some sense that was true, but mainly it was misrepresented. I exchanged mostly emails (TENCs) with them about patients and frequently didn't see or talk to some of them for days at a time other than good morning and good night (I barely exchanged words with the other nurses there because we rarely saw one another during the day as well). They were just as busy seeing live patients and, when I told one doc I was leaving, Daniela, and she said that she understood re: the learning issue as the clinic is a poor place for even doctors doing their rotations to learn. There just isn't the time available to do so because the doctors themselves are always running to play catch-up.
All the metrics are set up for one thing and one thing only: make primary care, or health care in general, profitable. The only way to accomplish that is volume. We were recently told that we need to make hospital follow up calls and given a hand out about it with some rather elegant doublespeak about caring for patients and the rate of illness that occurs after hospitalization. However, what stuck out the most prominently was a graph on the last page that assigned a dollar figure to each of these hypothetical patients and how much money that those follow ups to their primary care doctors might generate. Cold reality on display.
So, will I miss it? Well, in some ways I think I will. I will write more about the new job in the next post, but lets just say it will be far less peopled. I will miss working with a team, though we often didn't work on the same projects. I will the banter, the laughs at our own and at the patients expense, and I will miss the common bond of fighting a battle you can never win. But will I miss the job? Well, if you think that you haven't been paying attention the last few months.
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