You're Hired!

So, I'm quitting my job. Pretty soon.

And I finally got off my duff and decided to look into travel nursing. Within a week of starting the process, I had seven job interviews (some of which I haven't even done yet) and two job offers within a half hour of interviewing. Both jobs come with free, furnished housing, amenities, travel stipends, insurance, and pay around $5/hr more than what I'm being paid now. One position is even a *day* position.

Interviewed unshowered, unkempt, while sitting out of my front porch with my dog on a lovely spring day.

It's like hitting the jackpot.

And I'm on vacation now for two weeks.

Oh life can be good when you make change :).

Now I have to make a decision: where do I want to go?!

Nice to be wanted, as opposed to being shit on, which is how my current job feels.

The Green Hornet

Okay, so today I'm having one of those not-bad-suppose-it-could-be-worse-days. I finally get to take a break around 1:30-2:00p.m. (I walked on the floor at 6:45 a.m.) and I'm using my cell phone in the stairwell. I finally hit ground floor, near the elevator lobby. Three people in hospital scrubs, whom I assume to be some permutation of nurses and RT's, are coming out of an elevator with what looks like a very sick person on the stretcher: five drips, 3 monitors, RT is bagging the patient.

Being a courteous person, and realizing, even while having a business conversation on my phone, "Hey, that patient looks sick!" I wave them ahead of me. Engrossed in my conversation, I am sort of distracted when one of the nurses gives me a very dirty look, as in, "I know you! You're that nurse that sneezed into Dr. So-and-so's sterile field during my patient's thoracotomy, and now he's got god-only-knows-what-kind-of-nosocmial-infection!!"

I've never seen any of these people in my life, when all of a sudden Nurse #1 goes, "HEY! YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE USING A CELL PHONE HERE!" And then the other lot start chiming in, all Cell Phone Uber Nazi Style. They even protest that some Doctor-so-and-so who claims it does mess up the telemetry, as if the title "doctor" carries any damn authorative weight with me.

Not only are they being rude, they are also being rude assholes. Like, get a grip, it's the fucking lobby floor, with signs posted all over that I can use my goddamn cellphone if I wish. Besides, if it fucked up telemetry so much, why isn't your patient in v-fib?! HUH?! HUH?!

I have no idea why they are harrassing me, but I was quite pissed off about the whole incident. Too bad I was too tired to get into Jerry Springer Memorial Hospital Smackdown 2006, because I was thinking first of all, mind-your-own-beeswax, bitches, and second (and most ironic):

Dude, you've got a very sick patient there, obviously, or he wouldn't be on multiple drips, bagged, with three monitors and three care providers taking him down to some STAT CT scan or whatever. HOW ABOUT PAYING ATTENTION TO YOUR OWN PATIENT AND QUIT WORRYING ABOUT FUCKING CELL PHONE INTERFERENCE, ASSHOLES?!

Incidentally, it would have been classic retribution had they been yelling at me whilst meanwhile the patient crashed. Then I could calmly say, "Uh, did you notice your patient just cardiac/respiratory arrested, or were you too busy screaming at me to notice your patient on three different fucking monitors, you asstards?!"

Priorities, people. Priorities.

Or, I could have just said, all Mary J. Blige-style, "Hey, we don't need no haters!"

It was one of those times I wished I could swear in Spanish, all gansta-style, and say something cool like, "You fucking lazy garbage-ass ho's!"

I was discussing this weird behavior with one of my friends, and suddenly had the epiphany, as in: "Oh my god! Maybe they thought I was a resident, or worse, an intern!"

I was wearing the hospital scrubs that are this sickening surgical green. Surgical residents tend to wear them pretty much to exclusion of street clothes, I expect because they make unparalleled sleepingwear. Nurses get them either because they are OR nurses or because they are floor/ICU nurses who got some kind of shit, piss, vomit, sputum, blood on their own scrubs and had to walk down five flights of stairs in their filthy condition to beg a pair of scrubs from central supply (because they won't tube them up to you any more, probably because it takes them away from their five half hour coffee and smoke breaks per shift as mandated per their union-backed labor contract or whatever). I think I have about four pairs of them myself, and even though they're sized "small" I think they mean this is relative terms, much as say, in the same universe in which Michael Yao qualifies as a "small" person.

But I did probably look tired, and harrassed, and well, Asian, so I suppose I looked very resident minty fresh to bitchy ICU nurses who are more than willing to tear their pound of flesh out of any random PGY 2 that happens to cross their treacherous path. Because of the Bitterness and Anger, you understand.

Meanwhile, I hope I don't get stuck on the same-day stay on my unit, or what I like to call, same-shit-different-day unit.

I must go meditate on the zen of my dog's ass, or something.