Slow paced RN needs a slower pace nursing job!!

[VU RN BSN]

hello my fellow nurses!

i need career advice. somebody please help me!

ok, here is my intro. i have been a registered nurse since august 2004, so it's been 4 years now. i do have my bsn. i did a 4 year nursing program in pennsylvania straight out of high school. i moved to the tampa bay area of florida after i graduated college, because that is where my parents had moved to and we still live here.

ok, here is my problem. it seems that i am too slow to work as a nurse.

i made the huge mistake (didn't realise it then, understand it now) of starting out in critical care nursing as a new grad. when i interviewed for my first nursing job, the hospital where i wanted to work offered me a critical care internship for new nurses, and honestly they kinda pushed me into it, so i accepted the job offer. so, i spent my first 10 months as a night shift nurse in a ccu (coronary care unit) and i was in way over my head. i could not keep up. i was so stressed out. it made me a nervous wreck. nurse manager told me i always looked like a "deer caught in headlights". so, i was transfered to a medical / cardiology telemetry floor. that was a disaster. i ended up needing therapy/counseling and being placed on effexor xr because i was soooo depressed and anxious. i did not do well as a night shift nurse on the telemetry floor. i couldn't keep up. i could never get my documentation/charting done on time. i struggled with getting all meds passed on time. i struggled with juggling admissions and discharges and inpatient care. i was always in trouble and verbally abused and written up for not having my charting done at the end of my shifts. i cried my eyes out after most of my nursing shifts. after about 6 months, i gave up. figured i had made the wrong career choice and chose the wrong major in college. i tried a massage therapy course at a local massage therapy school, but i wasn't a natural at it and i felt like i was the worst student in our class. i finished the program and received my diploma, but never took the licensing exam since i did not feel capable of making a living as a massage therapist. so, i am not an lmt. instead, i forced myself to going back to nursing. i received a job offer from a local outpatient same day surgery center to work in the pacu. it was post-op and post-endoscopy. that turned out to be the worst job i have ever had. i hated it there. the place was a surgery mill. it was assembly line nursing. the pace there was fast, fast, fast! i was constantly told that i was too slow. always lectured that i spent too much time with each patient, that i allowed them to stay in the stretcher bed too long, that i was too nice to patients, that i needed to be able to juggle more pacu patients at the same time, etc. i only lasted there for 9 months. i was a burnt out depressed mess when i came out of there. ended up in therapy/counseling again. needed to take time off to recover. next came my most recent job, which was in hospice. i interviewed with the hospice organization in my county, and was offered a job as a home hospice nurse, which they call a primary care nurse. i usually had a caseload of 17-20 hospice patients, i was their case manager as well as their primary nurse who visited them in their home for assessments and evalutation and provided palliative care. i couldn't handle it. i was drowning in paperwork and struggled with getting all the charting and documentation turned in every week. i struggled with getting every patient's home visit done on time. i felt too young and too inexperienced to adequately help my patients. i was told by my manager that my home visits were too long (i spent too much time with each patient) and that i have a problem with boundaries (as in i allowed my patients to take advantage of me and my time and i tried to do too much in my efforts to help). after 8 months of hospice nursing, i finally accepted the fact that i am not cut out to be a hospice nurse and i resigned. obviously, i have been depressed and have needed counseling since then and at this point i have taken time off from nursing for the past few months to try to recover.

so, the question is, what do i do now??? i have to get a new job, i have to work. obviously, as you can tell, i have a serious time management problem. i have struggled with time management since i was a child! i always needed more time on tests, always took forever to write papers. still managed to get mainly a's and some b's and i was an honors student. so i'm not stupid. i am often told that i am intelligent. my iq is above average. i did very well in college, i made dean's list. but yet every nursing clinical professor told me during nursing clinicals that i was too slow, that i needed to speed up, to work faster, that i had to work on my time management.

i do have dysthymia. i was diagnosed with dysthymia during my senior year of college/nursing school. have probably had it most of my life. just feels like "this is the way that i am" and i will most likely struggle with this for the rest of my life. the problem ofcourse is when i wind up with double depression, which is an episode of major depressive disorder on top of the already existing dysthymia. this seems to always occur while i am working full time as an rn. nursing seems to suck the life out of me and make me severely depressed.

i have to go back to working full time and i have to get a new job now. since i have been a licensed rn for 4 years now and my college degree is in nursing, i believe that i am stuck in the field of nursing. so, i have to keep looking for a more appropriate nursing job. to be perfectly honest and frank, i hate nursing, i hate being a registered nurse. but what choice do i have? my father will kill me if i leave nursing altogether. i can't just throw away that bsn degree. you can't just throw away 4 years of nursing school. it was very important to my dad and to my grandfather that i got accepted and attended a prestigious university, so i made them happy, and i can't just let that nursing training and bsn degree be a waste of money. my dad would never forgive me.

i don't know what sort of a job to apply for next. i feel like my nursing career at this point in my life is a mess. obviously, my resume is not very impressive and human resources people will see the red flags. the economy sucks of course. every month here in america our economy gets worse because of the recession, so i doubt there are many job opportunities at this point. i'm guessing the only people hiring nurses right now are the hospitals, and i'm sure it's only in the high stress, high burn out areas like med-surg, telemetry, icu, etc. they always need new rns. am i right??

so, what should i do? should i just suck it up and try to work on a med-surg floor for 1-2 years so that i get that necessary 1-2 years of med-surg experience? are there any other nursing specialties i should try or could try? should i do oncology? psychiatric? women's care/gyn? i just don't know anymore. i wish i had simply started out in medical-surgical, since older experienced nurses insist you need that med-surg foundation. i'm afraid i won't survive on a med-surg floor. i'll have to work night shift again, i'm a night owl, i can't sleep at night, i am not a morning person, i can't do day shift. i need a job that pays well, because the economy is so horrible. so, my only option is going back to hospital nursing, right? are there any lower stress, slower paced Nursing Jobs in existence? is there any hope for me? can a slow nurse who struggles with time management actually find a nice rn job where she can be successfull?

i don't know what to do.

i don't know where to look.

any advice, suggestions, thoughts, encouragement, etc would be greatly appreciated and very much needed.

thank you.

(btw ~ my mbti or myers-briggs personality type is an isfp/infp)

p.s. i already tried career counselng. i went to a career counselor over a year ago and took all his tests and talked with him, and he didn't know how to help me or what to suggest.