Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The day before work...part 1

I say the day before work part 1, because I work a night shift tomorrow, which means technically tomorrow is before work too, and also a day. So, it can be part 2.

My anxiety before work has gone down considerably since switching floors. I used to nurse on a cardiac floor, which was all well and good. I'm fairly good in a stressful situation, (if I am allowed to do anything that is), but the bullying that was occurring on the floor was outrageous. When I say that, I mean that I would be able to walk around the corner, still be insight and still have the other nurses talk about me as if I wasn't there. And they were not good things. I would feel centered out, but they did it to a lot of other people as well.

I guess to fully understand this story, those of you out there that are not familiar with the nursing profession in anyway, need to understand that this is a profession that is currently still 95% women. There are men, and they are awesome, (and no not all male nurses are gay, in fact I've met one gay male nurse), but the women still rule in this job. Yay! Or well, maybe not so much. The problem with a women run environment is the gossip. Gossip at it's core, with a lot of women, really isn't as dangerous as they make it out to be however, there is a select group of women out there that use gossip to completely destroy people. This usually comes from the Alpha female, looking to weed out the weaker females in the group. (Men from my understanding usually use violence...that would be so much better. I wonder if that's true....I don't know much about anthropology, someone should really find that out for me.)

Now, on most floors, there are a few of these particular women, and the other nurses know about it. If there isn't that many the other women usually just smile and nod and allow this person to believe they are in charge, even though most of us are rolling our eyes behind the door and praying for the next shift when we can work with the normal people again. On the floor that I got the honor to work on, apparently all the alpha nurses from the other floors decided that this was the floor they needed to be on. yeah. great. Not enough power for all these power hungry nurses. It made for a very hostile work environment.

I was able to escape most of the problem by working only nights, except as a mother of a toddler, it made it impossible to get any sleep. Not enough sleep is the biggest trigger for all my anxiety and depression issues. It was a bad cascading problem. Especially when I did finally get day shifts added to my schedule an the very thought of doing them made me very sick.

Now I am working on the in-patient psychiatric floor. More my field of interest to start with, second it's like a completely fresh start with new faces that don't know who I am. I can build myself a new work life. Or that's the hope anyway. I'm sure there this floor has it's share of Alpha nurses as well, but I'm already also finding out that there is much fewer here than on any other floor that I've worked on. I'm looking forward to it. I like learning. I like psychiatry. I like the idea that I don't have to change adult diapers.

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