Help! Thinking about changing field and from 12's to 8's

Hi everyone,

I have been a nurse in a Level II Nursery for nearly two years now, hired in from before my graduation. It was the Dream Job, and it is amazing. I truly love it for the most part. I work 12 hour day shifts which I love (even when they turn into 16 hour days) because I LOVE having the 4 days off a week. I am an extreme introvert, and childfree, so the schedule really works for me. However, my anxiety levels are rising. (You can skip this backstory if you like, the TLDR at the end is the meat of the question.)

As a still fairly new nurse it's taken me this long to build an admittedly still-shaky, very base foundation of confidence in my skill level. There is a lot on our shoulders, we're a pretty small hospital and while my entire floor is NRP trained, the nursery nurse is often alone as the only nursery nurse, and we attend all deliveries alone without a pediatrician in the hospital at all times. Obviously, some deliveries go bad, and resuscitating a newborn is TERRIFYING with an entire floor of nurses, let alone by yourself. I tell them often how uncomfortable I am with being the only nursery nurse on my shift, and they do try to have someone with me, but it's not always.

There are some corporate changes happening in our hospital, and our manager, who is the only person that advocates for us, is leaving, adding to the overall general anxiety of our entire floor. Employee morale is definitely at an all time low for ALL of us. I don't think they care at all that if something goes wrong, it's MY LICENSE and MY CAREER and MY LIVELIHOOD on the line. We're losing good nurses left and right because of the general unease and burnout we've all got going, and some absolute bullsh** pay changes. (Not to mention all the experienced nurses are the ones leaving first because they're the preceptors and they're bringing in new hires that are making higher pay than the people training them..it's not flying well.) It just feels like a sinking ship every day right now.

I've been trying to not let my emotion and the low overall morale influence me to make a stupid decision to make a career change from a job I generally love, especially if it's not the right thing to do, but my anxiety is getting SO BAD. I've recently had a bad couple of shifts pretty close together, one where we had no further control outside of what we'd done to attempt to stabilize, we thankfully got it shipped to a bigger ped hospital in time, but I was standing there watching the clock tick and watching that baby slowly crash and burn while we waited on the helicopter. Then in that same week-ish we had a communication error kind of all around, and nothing bad happened, but it gave me a scare, and I was just starting to feel a little more confident again.

Even going in to that delivery, I knew it was going to go badly and I was as prepared as I could be, everything was ready to go. I actually had a set of hands that day, one of our PRN nurses, that's never liked me from the get-go and she doesn't trust me. She never works, so she's never seen me work to even learn or start to trust me or my ability. Leaving out details for privacy obv, but she tried to blame the entire thing on me when it was a 4-way miscommunication between 3 nurses and a doctor in a hectic delivery. She's the type to stand and watch you drown instead of lifting a finger to help, just to see how you sink or swim, to prove a point (When there's a very vulnerable patient on the line, she disgusts me, tbh.) and that's exactly what she did.

She's also the type to sprinkle passive aggressive statements about your ability wherever she walks, to twist the knife in your gut when you've done everything you can. She did two of those type of jabs after this overall harmless mishap. I let the first one fly, again, because I know she's a terrible human and I've just accepted this, but the second time she was just straight up personally cruel to me, to the point that I had to walk away, and it has totally destroyed the very last of that foundation of confidence I had built. (I hope she sleeps well at night knowing she's the type of nasty bully they warn you about in nursing school. She's the straw that's broken the camel's back--literally making me question all my life and career choices.)

Anyway. The doctor was insistent the blame was on him and I told him it was just a miscommunication between all of us and I told the other nurse I wanted to type up a safety review report/debrief thing on it WITH her, like we would in any case like that, and told her so, and she went and did it behind my back with no debriefing, just the sniping, and without so much as asking for any of my input on MY DELIVERY. She even grabbed her monitor and turned the screen to hide it from me as I walked past her to throw something away as she was entering it into the system. I was already so angry I was shaking the entire rest of the shift, but that just threw me over the edge. She stepped literally all over my toes and was unprofessional, and she's honestly a monster of a human, who I very rarely have to work with, but now I'm wondering if maybe she's just /right/ that I'm not cut out for this, like she's thought since day one, when I was hired in.

I did go to our manager about the situation and she agreed that what she did was totally not okay and the way she spoke to me was cruel and it's going to be addressed..but I honestly don't care about that so much. I made it through the day and about 5 steps out the door before I burst into tears, then I literally slept for 12 hours and laid in bed for another 16 hours putting applications in ...everywhere. The next day I had to work after a couple off, I was just sitting there after report on the verge of a panic attack, and this constant feeling of dread is coming back more and more frequently. When I'm home, when I'm there. When I'm laying in bed and start thinking about having to go to work the next day. I looked at my apple watch and my resting heart rate was 110 just literally sitting at my computer after a non-stressful report with my favorite coworker. It feels like there's an elephant sitting on my chest constantly, I'm having heart palpitations, and I just feel like I'm on the verge of a full blown panic attack at any moment a lot of the time. (I have discussed with my Doctor. it is anxiety, not a heart issue. He gives me a limited supply of anti anxiety meds but I try to take them very rarely, and obviously only at home.)

TLDR: after that looong backstory: I'm thinking about getting away from bedside/hospital nursing and going to a pediatric clinic so I don't have such urgent situations on only my hands so often, and the one BIG THING holding me back aside from the fear of change/making the wrong choice, is switching from 3-12's to 5-8's, like, I'm literally sitting here in tears thinking about losing those extra two days off because I truly need them so bad with the physical exhaustion and emotional and mental strain, on top of being such an introvert. Has anyone that actually LIKES 12s (single, childless - moms seem to like the 8s a lot more.) been able to make the transition back to 8s? And thrive? Or am I going to hate my life even more than I do right now? I'm having a really hard time, my strongest support and my mentor is the manager that's leaving, and I'm feeling very hopeless and lost and I don't know where to turn.

If anyone made it through that entire thing, thank you for taking the time to read it, I'd love to hear what you think about changing from 3 days a week to 5.