River&MountainRN

Thank you! I needed the validation that it's okay to set up those boundaries, as she had already started the process of enmeshment: "Where are you going?", "Can I go too?", "When will you be back?", "You *will* be back by such-and-such a time...", passive-aggressively: "I hate to be such a burden, but..." etc. Thank you for replying!

Hi there, back again...on top of everything else (trying to coordinate everything for moving interstate-selling my house, getting a new job, finding a new place to live) and coming off a bad breakup and dealing with a crummy work situation, I just became the primary caregiver for my ill, older mother. Hopefully, this was/is just an acute illness (it's acute-on-chronic actually), but thanks to our "wonderful" healthcare system (read: sarcasm), she is now absolutely snowed in past, current, and future medical bills...which means I have a new roommate! Both where I live currently, and guess who will now be living with me after I move to my new state! I love her dearly, but I really didn't need this on top of trying to make the best out of a really crummy current situation at work and everything else. She's not sick enough to qualify for services, but not independent enough to live out on her own. I always knew it was coming (as an only child, it was my eventual duty as soon as I was born), but I thought I had more time. So, my question to you is: how do you still participate in self care and remain SANE while caring for an aged parent while also working in a caring profession (i.e. nursing) full time? Seriously, I don't know how much more I can take!

I once got a corporate-logo stress ball...oh, the irony!

Recognize and reward hard work...and I don't mean with a keychain or thank you note. When you get the same pay and the same evaluation score (because "we don't believe in giving 5's-the best or 1's-the worst to anyone") as your fellow employee who sits around and does nothing, and you're doing your work AND theirs because it would be unethical to let the patient be the one to pay the consequences of your coworker's laziness, then the harder working nurse is the one who is going to get burned out faster. This leads to the hard working nurse getting sick/injured more often and/or deciding to move on.

Right now I'm regretting it because I have a shift in 3 hours and I just found out my uncle died. While we can be cancelled at any time (up to and including to the point where we are in the patient's driveway and find out no one is home because someone "forgot" to notify us), we have to call in at least 4 hours in advance. The response I got when I called and asked about the policy in this case: "Well, he's already gone. Surely you can just go after your shift to be with your family".

What state are you having to move to? If you don't feel like listing it for anonymity's sake, that's ok: just use that question to start researching licensing requirements on your new state's Board of Nursing website. Most Boards also give you a rough estimate on turnaround time. For my purposes, my new state license could take up to 6-8 weeks...just to give you a timeline example. As far as letting management know, review your policies and procedures for the minimum notice time that you're required to give. As far as basic moving questions, feel free to PM me. In the past 19 years, I've moved 11 times (granted some of that was when I was a child, but the most recent 6 moves have been in adulthood).

I'm in the early phases of moving interstate. My licensure paperwork is underway, but I'll still need a job in my new state (thankfully, they're in abundance which is one of the reasons why I'm moving). I also still need to find a place to live (a rental for now but I also have pets, which complicates things). For nurses who have undergone this process before, do you have any survival tips? Right now I'm still able to juggle everything, but I can feel the mental strain building between trying to keep everything together at my current job, selling my house, trying to figure out housing in my new state when they want you to already have a job lined up, and trying to find a job when it seems like my odds would be better if I was already local. It's kind of a Catch-22: I don't want to jinx my chances of landing the wonderful jobs I have my eye on by applying too early/before I can tell them "yes, I have a place to live and can definitely start in x-amount of weeks", but I keep running into the issue of not being able to prove future income to potential rentals before I have a job offer from a local job. Thank you for any advice!!!

This nurse. Right here. I had more written, but we've all heard it before: lack of support and authority yet everything is the nurse's fault, getting hurt at work and then being threatened with being fired while still being out on leave, guilt trips for calling out when you're legitimately sick, guilt trips for wanting your days off to be your days off (i.e. not coming in when they're "desperate"), etc.

Another poster's article inspired the title. A lot of replies in that thread mentioned how HR will ghost applicants during the process, to the point where it's actually a pleasant surprise even when you get an e-mail saying you weren't selected for an interview just so that you can get closure and move on. What other "it's just the way things are" corporate/workplace situations bother you most? For me, one of the top ones has to be we have to call out at least 4 hours in advance, but not more than 8 hours in advance, but we can be cancelled en route to a case. Or, lately, scheduling won't even let us know we're cancelled---we just show up to an empty house and it's only when we call in to the office that we're told "oh yeah, Patient So-and-So went into the hospital yesterday".

My typical night shift looked like this if I had two or more in a row: -Sleep normally the night before (as in, actually sleep at night), though I tried to stay up a bit later if possible and sleep a little later in the day -Nap before going in (length of nap depended on how much I could force myself to nap/what I had going on that day) -Work the shift -Come home, decompress for about 15-30 minutes -Sleep about 5-7 hours (usually that's all I can sleep in one block post-night shift anyway) -Wake up, take care of whatever household chores/responsibilities/socialization -Nap again before work (ideally 1-2 or so hours) -On the morning I get off my last nightshift and have the next few nights off in a row, I'll scale back my sleep during the day so that I can function like the rest of the "day walkers" -If I was facing a schedule of night on-night off-night on-night on, I'd still try to maintain a quasi-nightshift schedule on that middle night off, so that it wouldn't be as painful as flipping back and forth.

Baby steps! If you're of the mind to, keep a journal when moments like these happen. It's a good way to have proof (for yourself, especially when you have less-than-confident days) of how far you've come over the years!

I've heard of 2 weeks, 4 weeks, that it's ok to call out sick during that time, that it's not OK to call out sick during that time... We can be terminated at any time, but we need to play the game, toe the line, and follow policy. That's what it comes down to: policy. I'd encourage your wife to find out the exact policy (usually written in an employee handbook, so she doesn't even have to ask around and get the word out there that she's looking to possibly leave). Otherwise, depending on how large an organization she works for, she could always ask HR. I worked for a company whose HR was so far removed from the day-to-day practice that I was practically anonymous when I contacted them. And, yes, companies can and will screw you over with a "Do Not Rehire" if you don't follow policy or if you give them other ammunition to do so, even if it doesn't seem like a big indiscretion to an outside party. Just read some of the threads around here.

Bumping this post up, because I'm curious too!

Having worked LTC, I'd agree with you that if the CDiff resident absolutely couldn't have their own private room for whatever reason, then they should at least be the one to have access to the bathroom. The non-CDiff resident could either use a commode or use a "common"/public one off the hall (if your facility is laid out that way).

Been there, done that, have my Subaru for our usual blizzards for up to 2-3 feet at a time. My post was more tongue-in-cheek/humor for the HUGE (I don't know, but I'm pretty impressed a SIX feet, and I grew up in New England) six feet of snow that parts of California just got. Granted, when I asked around, it was in the mountains---great for the ski folks, didn't really affect the daily goings on for most (though goodness knows California has been getting the crap beat out of it lately!). But heaven forbid six feet fell in a short amount of time around here. We do well, again, with your "average" blizzard, but I think we'd be left scratching our heads with all six falling at once.