How do I continue to do this career? I feel like I’ve tried every available, reasonable option. I’ve worked the floor, I worked the E.R, I’ve travel nursed, I did clinical coordinator, and now I do Home Health....suppose to be part time but never is. I’ve driven 1.5 hours to get to work and I’ve worked 30min away from my home. I have been a nurse for 11 years this month and I’m just tired of trying to make it work. Part of my pain is something that has nothing to do with work...and yet does a little bit. Because I was traveling around and trying to find a fit, and because I can count on one hand the amount of men I have worked with, I did not date much and thus did not get married until I was 33. My husband and I have been trying to have a child and it isn’t working out well. We have been told that IVF is our only realistic option but we can’t even get approved for a loan to do it due to my husband’s previous debt. And unfortunately I only make 50k a year and only have a house payment in my name, but they tell me for my husband and I to get approved for the loan we would need to make about 130k a year. My husband is a tradesman and we have never made more than 80k together in a year. However last year he did not have any work at all (Trumps great economy my ***.) Adoption is about as much as IVF and since my husband and I are older also a kind of long shot. (He is 57 and I am 38).
Yes I could probably go back to travel nursing or return to the ER and make more money than I do now, but I’m just tired. Travel nursing was not terrible, but it is always having to learn a new place, system, doctors, and hope you are following their policies correctly when everyone is to busy for you to ask questions. And it is lonely as my husband can’t get work if he is traveling with me. The ER was okay until my dad died 2 years ago and then all the sudden it got very hard to take care of codes for me. Now I do Home Health which is a cake walk compared to my hospital experience, except the charting. Like I can see all my 6-7 patients in 8.5 hours, and I do try to chart as I see them, but I usually have 2-3 hours of charting to do every evening once getting home. Not to mention that I always have to work a little the day before calling the patients with visit times and organizing my day (my agency requires we call the night before between 5-9pm). I usually drive 80-100 miles a day. And thus I feel like I never get a real day off because either I’m catching up on my charting or I have to be home to receive my schedule (we have EPIC and no longer get the schedule emailed to our phones, it is only on our work computer and I’m not carrying that around everywhere) by a certain time. And if the people doing the schedule are late putting it out then I can’t get to things I want to do like yoga which is from 6pm-7:30pm. As I don’t have a full team of patients that are mine, I always have 4-5 people on my schedule that I am unfamiliar with. So unlike full time people who kind of know who they are going to see day to day, I almost never do.
I just feel there is no winning with nursing. In all of my jobs I almost NEVER get out on time. I almost ALWAYS have more patients than agreed to be caring for in my interview. I mean hell, when my dad died at 11am it took until 6pm for the hospital to get things squared away so I could leave without fear of abandonment. I actively now screen my calls and I NEVER pick up, then get ***ed at for not being a team player. This last job in home health I made it very, very, very clear that my time comes first. It isn’t about money, although I definitely deserve the money they are paying me plus some. I gave back a 10K bonus and was like ‘All I want from you is a work load that allows me to have my life back.’ Needless to say there is always some excuse why I have 7 patients instead of 6, or why my 6 patients are 80-100miles of drive time. I’m just done. There is always some reason why we (me and my coworkers) need to do more and be better. There is minimal education with outrageous expectations. I am just done. I am a good, reliable, safe, and compassionate nurse. I have worked many, many jobs and have maybe met a handful that I could not describe in the same manner. It isn’t us not doing the work right or well or fast enough that’s the problem. It’s the institutions and their ***ing nut job expectations. It is patients that go to hospitals called ‘Hospitality’ (that is the real name of a hospital in the Houston, Texas area BTW) expecting a spa day instead of care and business minded idiots who set up that expectation from the get go by naming their ***ing institution Hospitality. I just want to go to work, do my job, and be allowed to leave on time 90% of the time. I want to be able to pee regularly and have a regular lunch break, and lastly I want to have enough energy when I get home (or the next day) to have sex with my husband so I can hopefully have a family....so I can have my life.
Sadly I just don’t see that as a possibility as a nurse without just being a real ***. Like I am just going to have to say no to being in any committee, to staying late EVER for anyone else, to working extra or working over. I find this really hard to do because I believe in team work. I know that team work is how we make it through, but if I stick to my own I can get done. If I do nothing extra I can be with my husband and not be quite as exhausted. I just don’t see how helping others means I have to sacrifice myself this much and I really don’t see humans as worthy of the sacrifice of myself as I once did when I was 22 and really idealistic. I believe everyone deserves good, data based, compassionate care, just not at the expense of my life and desires....ever.
How are you only making 50k as an experienced nurse? that would be extremely low pay here even for a new grad. I think the minimum around here would be $29 an hour.
Specializes in Surgical Specialty Clinic - Ambulatory Care.
38 minutes ago, Decisions7 said:
How are you only making 50k as an experienced nurse? that would be extremely low pay here even for a new grad. I think the minimum around here would be $29 an hour.
That is what I make an hour $29.71 in home health and I work four 8 hour shifts a week....I recently just went up to 5 days a week. New grads in my area are starting 23-25 an hour. I live in southern Illinois. 10 years ago when I started I made $20 an hour. I have made more per hour in the past, but I am done with the ER and travel nurse stress for right now. And that is just a trap of nursing you make the most pay right out of school and by switching jobs frequently. You do not get paid well to stay in the same place.
Specializes in Surgical Specialty Clinic - Ambulatory Care.
7 hours ago, ms boogie said:
Making 50,000 as a registered nurse is embarrassing. That is about half of what you should be making. That is very low for Illinois.
I don’t agree with you about the “half” part. My friend who has been struggling to find a job she enjoys as well. We were new grads together. She was a director of nursing at a home for mentally handicapped kids, they about murdered her there with the responsibilities. She also ended up having to work regular shifts as they were under staffed and she was salaried at 63K a year. Sooooooo not worth it....she finally quit after one of the resident/patients wiped jizz on her. Terrible, terrible job. Now she makes $34 an hour working at a long term care unit which she describes as like a SNF/Medical Surgical unit from hell where she has about 10 patients a shift who are mostly bed bound, need wound care, meds & IVs, and a few with peritoneal dialysis among other therapies. If that is the kind of *** I have to do to make 70K a year and then be in a higher tax bracket.....eh no. One of my coworkers makes $31 an hour and she has been a med surg nurse for 16 years.
Now that I will be 5 days a week and a true 40 hours...I can expect about 60-65K. But nothing about comparing my pay to my peers makes me think I make “half” of what I should make. I made 15-20k less than them working less than they did.
I see you have an MSN and are in critical care, maybe this is why you feel that way? I would expect a critical care nurse to get paid more.
No one should be made to feel bad for making a low salary. Possibly, these things can be negotiated at the start a bit, but for the most part in many places it is a monopoly. Each hospital in a region knows what the other pays, and without unions or legislated law, to keep the large organizations in check they just take advantage of nurses in every way that they can.
Where I live new grads are started at 22 an hour. I called 4 hospitals when I first moved here and each one quoted the same number. Ha ha ha. I did not even apply because even with my experience, they would only go up slightly. Ridiculous. I did find work making about 30 but that is incredibly low given my experience. It depends on where you live.
I’m very sorry to hear about all that you are going through. We do have to take care of ourselves in order to adequately care for others. You could try private duty nursing in which you’d only have to travel to one client for a set amount of hours. Unless your relief doesn’t show up you are guaranteed to get out on time. As some people mentioned, you could try working outpatient as well. Maybe more of a desk job in nursing could work for you too (MDS or something of that nature).
It’s so difficult when you need the money but not the stress.
The kind of personality/person who is predisposed to being in nursing often has a difficult time saying, "No." Learn to. It is an essential life skill.
Your sadness in having an older father and the pitfalls of such a situation are just as much of a sap story as me wanting kids all my life and having no end of road blocks trying to get there. Life circumstances are what they are and despite how much we puny humans want to believe we have control over our circumstance, our exertion over how events go down is much more minimal than we collectively like to believe.
For example, like most people I believed myself to be in a society that is a meritocracy. That my performance and capabilities would matter more about my success in life than just luck and fate. The whole, “If you want to be rich you need to work harder and smarter.” ***. Well there is a recent study from France that confirms that the 20% of the population that has the wealth in the world is an unchanged percent since recorded history. If we lived in a meritocracy then it would be reasonable to assume that those with 20 percent of the wealth have disproportionately higher IQs, talent, and in general just more capable than the rest of us. Turns out that is untrue. The incident of high intelligence and talent is equal in both the 20% and the less wealthy 80%. It is just dumb luck and the way life unfolded that the majority of rich got to where they are. And reasonable to believe that if every person had the same circumstances happen to them that we would be living the wealthy life instead of that 20%.
One needs to be selfless to be a parent, but there are NO selfless reasons to choose to have a baby. The only non selfish circumstance that becoming a parent occurs is an unintentional pregnancy.
With that said there is NOTHING fair about being born or the circumstance one is born into. And while I can tell you that I have thought about the effects on my hopeful child; they are not so detrimental that I shouldn’t try. Life is sad. You worry about the person you love not being there. So does the 12 year old girl who’s mom just got diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. Just life.
I'm presenting you with considerations to be made on behalf of your husband and your potential future child. You can choose to have a child. You can't choose to be poor, or born in a 3rd world country, or have a mom with stage 4 ovarian cancer. I'm just giving you a glimpse of what is could potentially be like for your child to have a parent of that age range, based on my personal experience.
I'm guessing this whole process has already crossed his mind and is a big factor in his decision making process.
If that is the kind of *** I have to do to make 70K a year and then be in a higher tax bracket.....eh no. One of my coworkers makes $31 an hour and she has been a med surg nurse for 16 years.
I've been working for IHS on an acute care floor for 4 years now and started as a new grad (GS5). The work is challenging and often frustrating but looking at my end of year pay stub, while it says I make $29+ an hour the total I'm looking at is 89K which does not include several thousand dollars in matching retirement made on my behalf, 12K health insurance tax free, and 18+K of student loan repayment . I could do one hell of a lot worse. Not easy to get on and you'll probably have to move..... but...
Specializes in Surgical Specialty Clinic - Ambulatory Care.
Update: I became a mom 4 months ago. It has been the best thing to ever happen to my soul. I hope to have another, but I am truly blessed to have my baby. My husband admitted he was hoping we never got pregnant; which pissed me off royally. Like don’t get married to someone in the hopes to change them, men or women. Working against someone’s plans in a relationship when you agreed to the opposite is just a hateful thing to do. But we worked passed it and he has been a wonderful stay at home dad...and he enjoys it and regrets working against me now. I still regret being a nurse. I love patients and patient care but the demands on my time are often significantly above the 40 hour weeks I agreed to. I am afraid to try surgery. I kinda fear doctors because most of them are mean. I can take it, I’m just tired of having to.
Decisions7
22 Posts
How are you only making 50k as an experienced nurse? that would be extremely low pay here even for a new grad. I think the minimum around here would be $29 an hour.