Oh wow, you guys have some real horror stories for lengthy days!
At my company as a full-time acutes nurse I do three shifts in a day (meaning three patients). I'm still relatively new to dialysis, only been in it for about 5 months (~2-3 months all by myself), so the whole process takes a long time. I feel like I spend half my time either setting up machines, breaking down machines, or paperwork and charting, rather than actually dialyzing the patients. For three patients, I'm at the hospital for 17-18 hours. Some of the night-shift floor nurses will see me, and they'll be shocked that I'm still there! lol
When my days are just that long, and I'm getting out at 2:30 am, it's best that my work days are spaced out, otherwise I'm on like 3 hours of sleep before I have to do a whole 'nother 3-patient-day all over again. But the flip-side is that if my days are spaced out (let's say Monday-Wednesday-Friday) then my days off are spent catching up on sleep and getting ready to go back to work the next day. So it's starting to feel like work is taking over my life. All in all, dialyzing is relatively straightforward (though not easy per se). I'm not a big fan of the schedule, though. When I worked in ICU, I worked all three of my nights in a row (Friday night/Saturday night/Sunday night) to get the differential monies, as well as to have four days off. Sure, the Sunday nights suuucked because I'd feel tired, but at least when I was off I knew I could spend some time mentally away from work.
So I don't know how this'll play out longer term. *shrugs* Right now the pay's great, I run into overtime without really trying, and management isn't pressuring me to get done faster, so I'm adjusting where I'm at. If it physically or mentally becomes too much down the road, though, I could switch to part-time or re-evaluate how I feel about dialysis. We'll see :-)
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