why work is a wanker.

I've managed to figure out a major distinction in my Why I Currently Hate My Life's Work.

It's not really about the job. The job itself, at this particular hospital, on this particular floor, is fine. The people I work with are really nice and mostly sane, and most of the time, I can get a marginal amount of shit done during a shift (which is saying something, given the usual conditions of hospital nursing).

It's more about the profession itself, and the basic job description of a nurse.

For example, I think, baseline, I'm supposed to care about my patient. And I think I do care, in so far as I deliver mostly safe, medically sound nursing care.

But, lately, I care less and less about the patient, and more and more about how very, very bored and frustrated I am with a job that is starting to feel increasingly stultifying and pointless, and never really made me particularly happy in the first place.

I'm tired of the subservience and general all around lack of social status associated with nursing. Nursing, for all its aspirations to be taken seriously as an actual profession, still is and always has been a pink collar job.

I'm all for degrees and professional advancement, I just don't think it's necessary in bedside nursing, and there's a reason why there are multiple points of degree entry that all culminate in the same licensing process and boards: because baseline, being a bedside hospital nurse requires some common sense, an ability to multitask, and a deep enjoyment of being treated like a servile wench.

It doesn't require years of college, however, and I have always thought that my years of schooling are an impediment to tolerating my working conditions, which often require me to modify my vocabulary and communication skills to that of an average seven year old in order to "reach" a "challenging patient" (read: noncompliant asshole).

For indeed, I find half to three quarters of my job duties, while requiring excellent organizational skills, feel to me as if a moderately intelligent fifteen-year-old with a solid babysitting background could probably manage independently if given minimal direction.

Practically nothing that potentially interests or attracts me about the profession (treating and managing disease) is actually in my purview or scope of practice, and ambulating patients to the commode and warning them about sternal precautions and using their incentive spirometer, day after day, frankly, gets a little old.

In short, it's hard to be stuck in a job when frankly, you know your intellectual capacities far outstrip the job requirements. I imagine most nurses end up feeling this way, at some point or another.

I'm really kind of over the profession, to tell you the truth. Going to work feels more like some kind of crappy adult version of detention, complete with writing lines.

I thought, maybe, doing ICU would make me feel more of a bad ass, but, on the whole, I think after a year or two, I'll simply feel like a monkey who's been trained to pull a few more levers and push a few more buttons. And that monkey will probably be even more stressed out, bitter, and overworked. So, I'm not sure I should really do it, even though the annoyingly type A, bitchy competitive part of me wants to do it.

Sadly, I'm currently all out of ideas as to what I should do, or what new stupid job I should pursue. The bad thing about being in a profession you hate is that it kind of starts crushing your soul after awhile, and you end up in this anhedonic, borderline depressive state which pisses off and alienates all your loved ones and colleagues. Especially when the whole ICU application process seems like a never ending scene from a Tarkovsky film.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try ICU, though. I mean if it sucks, that's basically par for the course , and I can do something else.

There's always the annual post-end-to-Daylight-Saving-Time depressive funk to resort to, as well, in which Jamie loses interest in her life and takes to sleeping 16 hours a day when not at work.

But, that doesn't sound very healthy, either.