I'm a nurse with several years of experience and entered the ICU nearly a year ago. I'm a good nurse and every day I give it my best shot. I participate in CE, I follow hospital policies and I take care of myself so that I am on my toes when I have to work (exercise, sleep, etc). I will admit that I can be a bit intense and become spastic if I feel that the care of my patients is being compromised or that I have been overwhelmed for too long and unable to get help.
I work at a large teaching hospital with a good reputation on a 24 bed MS ICU. I have a union job, good pay and I suppose it could be a lot worse. I'm just not happy and I haven't been since I started. I feel that I have legitimate concerns, but nobody cares and I'm just tired of it. First of all, I know this sounds like every hospital in the country; that's not my point. I need to work this out and get past it...
The other day a very obnoxious and loud-mouthed nurse told me I was crabby all the time and that people didn't want to talk to me because of it. Most of my coworkers enjoy working with me because I am fun and helpful; they have told me this. I do, however, have a very cynical attitude and do tend to be very expressive... I tend to voice my frustration rather than stuffing it; however, I never convey my personal feeling to patients or there families (ie, we're short-staffed, we have no supplies, my coworkers are lazy, pharmacy is incompetent, the place is a pigsty, you are driving me crazy,etc). I am a professional and when I'm with a patient, it isn't about me.
The aforementioned nurse is popular, well-liked and among the suck ups who tend to excel on my unit. She is lazy, mean to her patients, sloppy and an infectious nightmare. She will sit on her butt or roam around talking to her friends when her pod mates are drowning. Unfortunately, there are a great many nurses like her on my unit. New people come and go so quickly because they are overwhelmed, under-supported and frustrated by a very obvious caste system. The unit is run on negative feedback and governed by a clinical ladder system; new people get no opportunity to give input and are treated like peons (one of these nurses saw me in a pt's room about to insert a foley and she had the odacity to ask me if I knew the female urethra was above the lady parts -- I have been a med nurse for several years and she knows it) by a group of about 15 nurses who have no idea what it's like at the bottom of the ladder.
I'm leaving this job and have informed my boss (who is a very nice woman) that I will do so next year. When I came to the unit I made a 1-year commitment and I intend on keeping it; however, she has known from the beginning that I haven't been very happy. Yesterday, while preparing to process some paper work for my status change to casual, she very nicely told me that if I was miserable on the unit that I could leave and she wouldn't hold it against me. She said that being miserable isn't good for me or for the patients -- obviously being happy isn't either. I assured her that if I were miserable that I wouldn't hesitate to leave, but that I wanted to leave next year as planned. I held my tongue and did not offer any unsolicitated opinions (I have, at least, learned that much), but really wanted to ask her if she didn't think that the fact that the institution is recruiting nurses from 10,000 miles away might be a clue that there's a problem. I know that things are getting progressively worse and that change will come once things become absolutely chaotic; but not a second before.
My point is that I know that I am a good person and a good nurse, but I feel like nobody around me notices anything I do or cares that I really give it my all every time I work. I need to have value and to feel that I am contributing and I just don't seem to get that in nursing. There is the occasional patient or family member who is truly grateful, but they are few and far between. I have already left nursing once and I am just tired of constantly looking for something that doewn't seem to exist. If I quit nursing, I will be forced to file bankruptcy or default on my student loans (then I'll loose my license).
