Idiocy

You guys, I'm an idiot.

COVID has wrecked our comfy little ER way of life, in addition to being the Great World Fuckery of my lifetime. My job is stressful at baseline, and dealing with this pandemic has brought on so many changes. Hospitals are losing money hand over fist, so budgets are being cut wherever possible. The first thing to go at our ER was any overtime shift. As in, you can't work it. We operate at a below-par staffing level anyway, and cutting out all the overtime shifts has meant twice the work with half the staff. Oh, you're gowned up in a COVID room and need something? Better hope your coworkers aren't also taking care of a COVID patient because there is no one extra available to help. Two priority 1 traumas coming in? No extra nurses coming to the rescue, because ain't no one there. You're intubating your respiratory distress patient in the isolation corner? Sucks to be you, because our isolation rooms are staffed by ONE person.

There's a wave of new graduate nurses, which while new grads are great I'm not a fan of having twelve of them at once. I mean that literally. There are four orienting now, four more that just finished two weeks ago, and four more starting in another two months. Plus another eight that have less than a year on the job. Training in the time of COVID has been an especially big beating. Try teaching hospital policy to a new grad when the policy will change by the time you've finished explaining it.

It's been one of the hardest, most stressful times of my life.

So what did I do? I said, "how can I make my life more stressful right now?" and replied to the department-wide email asking for charge nurse applications.

Y'all. I applied for one of the two open charge nurse positions available. They picked me (and another coworker who I think will be absolutely fantastic as charge and I want to be like her when I grow up).

I'm an idiot.