Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Keep your fingers crossed...

...I'm requesting to be transferred to a new position at my hospital.  It is the Holy Grail of nursing positions.  Two days/week floating on the floors, doing things like admitting new patients, helping out the other nurses with random tasks, but not actually taking a patient assignment of my own, from 11am-11:30pm... plus one day/week taking an assignment on telemetry from 7am-7:30pm.  I wants it, oh do I wants it!!   

The HR department called me today to offer me full-time work... they wanted me to do three 8-hour shifts plus one 12-hour shift/week on nights.  I declined.  My commute to work is long, and ultimately I don't want to give up the flexibility that comes with working three shifts/week unless it's for the perfect job.  And to be quite honest... anything on night shift is automatically imperfect.  I'm tired of nights.  I'll keep doing it as long as I have to, but I can't tell you how much I miss sunlight, sleeping with my Honeybunch, and being able to relax with him over a glass of homemade wine when he comes home from work in the evenings. 

Plus, everything is just more difficult at night.  We only have one physician on staff in the whole hospital at night.  Our patient loads are enormous.  It's more difficult to get a hold of the supplies and help you need, should something be amiss.  There are fewer opportunities to teach, to get to know your patients.  They either don't want anything to do with you because they're sleeping, or they want everything from you all night because they're demented and frightened. 

So I'll put in for this position, and hope that they'll overlook my relative inexperience and choose to focus on the fact that I have awesome people skills that are being wasted during the nighttime hours. 

In other news, I'm hauling in loads of hot peppers from the garden... more sahuaros than I know what to do with.  Looks like I'd better get the dehydrator running again...

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