Me: I am a critical care nurse (RN, BSN, CCRN) with 2.5 years of experience. I am a lifelong midwesterner and recently decided to move out to the west coast with my lovely wife, who is not in healthcare (she is self-employed and works from home). I am 29 years old and was a high school teacher briefly before becoming a nurse. My primary motivation for the switch into nursing was to ultimately become a NP and either work in a neurology clinic (as a headache specialist) or open my own headache clinic one day. I have been in Portland now for 5 months.
Situation:
Work: Prior to moving out here, I had avoided ever working nights. I struggled for nearly my entire life to wrangle my own migraines under control, and a major component to my success was maintenance of a consistent sleep schedule. For this job, though, I had to take a night position. I work at a unionized hospital where seniority is everything, and my hospital is currently undergoing terse contract renegotiations with the nurses union. The hospital has decided to declare a sudden budgetary crisis and has instituted a hiring freeze. I am therefore one of the freshest faces on my unit. Other night shifters on my unit have been waiting over 3 years to make the move to days. My hospital has a 6 month "probationary period" in which a nurse can be fired at-will by the hospital. We are allowed to transfer to a different unit during this period but no other units that I am eligible to work in have open day shift positions.
Sleep: My landlord operates an AirBNB out of the unit below mine. If I slept on a normal schedule, this would not be an issue; However, the house I live in is very old. Any noises made in the AirBNB unit during the day reverberate through the framing of the house and echo in my bedroom. When I was interviewing with my landlord, I made it very clear that my primary concern was having a quiet space, and he assured me that his house is very quiet. It is, except when his wife cleans/turns over the unit for new guests, in which case it sounds like a tornado is ravaging the building. I can get no sleep these days and when I ask her if she could please wait until 5pm on just the three days each week I tell them I need to sleep, her exasperated response to me was, "You can't control EVERYTHING that happens! I'm being as quiet as I can!"
My issues:
Barriers:
I took a generous moving stipend offered by my hospital, but which I would need to repay if I were to leave before working with them for 1 year.
While I think that I would be able to get a couple of charge nurses to write me decent recommendations, I worry about leaving so soon and how that looks on future job applications.
My landlord would charge me $3K to break my lease before a year, and I am completely unable to pay rent without the high hourly rate I receive from my hospital.
I can not go on like this. My migraines are back with a vengeance and my mental health is slipping dearly. My anxiety is spiking, my perceived mental sharpness and ability to handle conflicts is decreasing greatly at this point. I feel less confident at work and am taking things too personally in my personal life. I feel constantly sleep deprived and I feel like I have been sick with upper respiratory issues without respite for months now. I fear that my life is falling apart and I attribute it mainly to feeling absolutely stuck with nowhere to go and nowhere to turn.
Possibilities: (most likely to help at top):
I get switched to day shift at my current hospital. This has an extremely low likelihood of happening but it would solve the most problems for me with the least amount of consequences. I would be willing to take an assignment pretty much anywhere if it meant not working nights.
There is nothing my current hospital can do and I stay there anyways, persevering until August when I leave without having to pay back any of my moving stipend. I get a therapist and try to remain sane until I am able to get out of my lease and job without paying fees.
There is nothing my current hospital can do and I quit early. I have to pay about $1000 back to them. I get a job for the next few months as a local traveler to avoid breaking my lease early.
What should I do? What have I not thought of? Thank you.
