Tired of being a nurse.
This is a long one so bear with me and please be kind.I’m over it already. I’ve been a nurse for a little over three years and almost every job I have I get treated like shit by management. 2 out of the four jobs I’ve had in the last three years I have been targeted by my DON and it’s making me not want to be a nurse anymore. My first nursing job was on a cardiac step down. I loved the job, the patients and the fast paced work. I was hired under a different DON and the new one started the same week as me. She very quickly latched onto the new grads and specifically me. At one point, she was calling me into her office and giving me tasks that interfered with my work and made distractions (a volunteer answered the phone when it bounced to the nurses station, so she called me in and demanded that I ask everyone on the floor who did it and report back to her) and at another point she assigned me a patient I had not yet been trained on (patient had pacer wires and didn’t want me touching him so I wasn’t able to properly assess his wounds and there wasn’t any other signage or notes in his chart stating he had them so I had discharged him to the rehab facility and I got in huge trouble and she tried to report me, and I said fine, but I also said she needed to be reported too because of her negligence and she did not like that. I quit on the spot. I was tired of her bs. There were many more Instances and I even tried to extend an olive branch but she still came after me.) I only lasted three nine months because of the bullying from her and other older nurses.
Next two jobs were okay, not bad, just horrible hours and I wasn’t making any money. One was an orthopedic clinic. One of the doctors treated me like shit but he had a huge attitude problem towards everyone and I’ve felt with that before so no biggie, at one point we found out that the head “nurse” wasn’t even a nurse. She lied about having a license and nobody even checked and she also stole over $7000 off of the company credit card lmfao. So after that the clinic kinda went to shit and I had to get out of there. After that I moved to home health, it was actually a nice job, I loved my patients and what I was doing and my coworkers were great. We just didn’t have any business. I wasn’t paid hourly, I was paid per appointment so I was actually broke. If I was paid hourly I would’ve stayed there!!
Now my current job, which I’m probably about to be fired from… I have never been fired from a job in my life. I’m not perfect and there’s always room for improvement. However, about a month ago or so. I left work after two hours to go to the er for a kidney infection and ever since then my DON has had it out for me I SWEAR. After the infection my health hasn’t be the greatest (not that it ever is, I have a plethora of chronic health issues, and they’ve been flaring since) but about a week after I had a patient in pacu recovering fine, vitals were done and stable, discharge instructions were gone over, iv was out, she just asked to relax a few more minutes and I said okay no problem. Well due to the antibiotics I was on my stomach was in shambles. So I ask my coworker hey can you just keep an eye on her I’m gonna run to the bathroom (10 ft away) or I’m gonna shit on the floor. She says okay. I come back and lady is still chillin and coworker is still watching. Well I get pulled into another room by DON and charge a few days later and apparently another coworker said they walked by and my coworker never was watching her. The one who walked by said “she looked like death” and reported it to DON. DON works in the OR so she keeps talking like she was there but she wasn’t. She goes on to say some other things that I did, that on one day, she had to remind me to “put patients on the monitor twice” which is bullshit because she was saying it as I was doing it. They proceed to tell me that they’re going to put me back on orientation in PACU. That happens for three days and then it goes back to normal.
Two weeks goes by. I get pulled again, DON says I’m still not improving (despite what other people have been saying, other people had been complimenting me on my work ethic and being personable with my patients) she says I’m still not connecting patients quick enough even though I’m literally standing in the bay with the cords in the hands waiting for the patients to arrive, she says I’m distracted, I socialize with patients too much (even though that’s quite literally my job), and just nit picking other little things. As soon as we’re out of the room, my charge pulls me into another room and says that she thinks DON is full of shit. She thinks that she’s making stuff up. Charge says that my coworkers have been complimenting my improvement. Saying how good I have been with patients. I could go on about this but I’m not going to waste my breath. They decide that they’re only going to allow me to admit patients and they’re going contact HR to “find some tools to help me succeed”, they never did this.
Yesterday I was low censused and I was relaxing and I receive a call from charge. She says “we need to talk”. She goes on to tell me that last week (when she wasn’t at work) someone reported that at 7:10 am I was “sitting down and not admitting my patient” and he was due for his procedure at 7:30. I genuinely do not remember this situation because it was about five days ago. But Charge doesn’t know how to schedule and assigned me to do 13 timeouts, multiple of them back to back at the same time that I’m supposed to be doing admits. The doctors at our ASC get extremely angry when they’re off time. So why would you schedule me to do them at the same time as my admits if you want me to be on time? I was also accused of saying I was gonna throw up in-front of a patient. I know for a fact I did not say this.
I am a newer nurse and I know I’ll make mistakes but I would never intentionally be unprofessional in front of patients. I would never do anything to put a patient in danger. I know there is some things I could have improved on, however I do not think I’m being treated fairly. I believe they’re making things up about me to get rid of me. At one point I shared that I was struggling mentally, and that may have been to blame as to why I wasn’t doing well and ever since then, they have been treating me like shit. There’s conflicting claims about the things I’m doing and when I confront them they can’t provide evidence. When they’ve said they’ve said they were going to “provide support or tools to help” they’ve failed both times. I’ve also been accused of stealing iv drugs, and lying on my resume. And the lady hired after me (who has more experience than me) was given more training than me.