Being a nurse and BSN student keeps one rather busy. These last few months had me up to my neck in classwork. What really gets me is that the fewer credits the course is, the more demands the instructor puts on us and the more work I have to do. One of my courses was only a 2 credit course, and we needed to make 9 posts a week, with the final project being a term paper and accompanying slideshow. The 3 credit course I'm in now seems like an absolute break.
I occasionally get twinges whenever I hear from classmates that went into med-surg. While I'm loving pysch and have no regrets, for that brief second I feel like a failure. Not that I am a failure in any way: med-surg is not the only area of nursing, and there's many nurses that have successful careers without even going anywhere near the area. I guess it's because that everyone pushed (pushes) it as the area that you must start off in to have any measure of nursing success. Yet I seem to be doing rather well as a nurse without it. Plus my unit gives me enough medical issues to keep it exciting.
Maybe I feel like that because of all of the rejections I got when I was hunting in med-surg. I think that's the case, because if I was truly unhappy then I'd have kept looking for the med-surg job and not carved out a full-time niche.
Or maybe it's an occasional resentful twinge, since I chose the psych job over the PCU because of the hours. I knew I couldn't be away from my child for 14-16 hour days. It's hard enough that my better half's days are at least that long, neverminding all of the underways and deployments. But you know what? I didn't want to put my child through that. We're fortunate enough in that if I didn't want to, I didn't have to work and we'd be OK financially. Not great, but we'd make it. I don't have to take a job with hellacious hours just to make ends meet. And frankly, when I look at his face, I don't want to work those hours.
And I definitely don't miss the blood, guts and demanding patients. If my patients come at me saying they need new sheets on their bed, I get to say "I'll get you clean ones so you can change them" and I won't get into trouble. Hell, I'm expected to say that :)
Oh well.
Work is going well. Still have staffing issues but since no amount of yelling and screaming will change it, I've pretty much adopted a zen attitude. I'm trying to get my supervisor to do the same. She gets so worked up over them and it's really stressing her out.
