Tell the World Project

[SJ2016]

My Experience as a Clinic Nurse during COVID

I chose to work in a dermatology office after an injury that I sustained while working bedside left me unable to work in that setting as I was unable to lift patient or stand for long periods of time. My job there is important, as I spend my days performing biopsies, performing other various procedures, maintaining lab results, and communicating those result to the providers, and assisting in surgeries.  Working during COVID has been different experience for every nurse but for me working in a clinic during COVID has left me depressed at one point, to feeling judged for where I work, to feeling like I do not matter as a person.

 At the start of COVID there was so much uncertainty and my boss decided to shut the office down and only see patients virtually as lot of other physicians did too. Since I was nurse, and we were not seeing patients in the office this left me laid off for almost three months. During that time, I went through a period of depression because I became a nurse to help people and here we were in a pandemic, and the world needed nurses and I was sitting at home waiting to go back to work. Those months were a struggle for me to even get out of bed, but I reached out to other nurses and found I was not the only one in that situation during that time. Some of my friends that were PRN were not getting hours and some of the nurses that worked in surgery were laid off too since they had stopped doing nonemergency surgeries.

Being back in the office, I feel that I get judge for not working in a hospital setting. When people find out I am a nurse they always ask if I work in the hospital and when I tell them no, it is always the same kind of response, like oh you just work in an office. I feel that my job could still put me at a higher risk of getting COVID, no I do not work on a COVID floor but there are many times a day that I have to be in patients faces and some of these patients do not take my health into consideration. I had a patient call saying that they had been exposed to COVID and did not want to cancel their appointment and did not think they needed to because they were just going to see me and not the physician. Another patient had been in the office a month prior, when talking to her, she proceeds to tell me about how her and her husband had COVID and that when she was here at her last visit he had been showing signs of COVID for two days prior, but she still came in.

While my job as a nurse in a clinic is different from a nurse working bedside during COVID, it is still important as we take care of skin cancers and other skin conditions, some that can be really painful.

[SmilingBluEyes]

I guess I don't understand why you give a damn what strangers think.

You stated your case about your job being critical here already. Tell them the same thing or just walk away and not worry what they think or believe.

[JKL33]

10 hours ago, SJ2016 said:

When people find out I am a nurse they always ask if I work in the hospital and when I tell them no, it is always the same kind of response, like oh you just work in an office.

I agree with the above; others' commentary isn't worth a second thought here.

Recognizing that the dismissive opinions of others don't matter is a function of feeling satisfied with your own life.

[tnbutterfly - Mary, BSN]

Please provide some details about this "Tell the World Project".  What school are you attending?