Why I left Healthcare!

As many of you know, before becoming a coach, I spent almost 10 years in the healthcare system. I was really driven to make it a career and keep growing. I started off as a Certified Nursing Assistant and worked at a memory care facility mostly aiding patients that had Dementia and Alzheimers. This was a huge transition of jobs as prior to this I worked at UPS and did mostly manual labor so the people skills and helping humans directly was very different but I did love it! I had a great experience aiding those in need and it was during this time that I decided for sure I wanted to be a Nurse. I had contemplated going the medical school route but to be honest, it seemed a bit daunting to me and I thought as a Nurse, I would also have the option to go the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist route or the Nurse Practitioner route if I really enjoyed it!

I worked at many different places; starting with memory care, then going to work with physical therapist helping patients with mobility issues, then wound care and into Nursing school. It was a very compelling time of my life where I had a clear vision and goal and was dedicated to achieving it. Nursing school was an incredible yet stressful experience as I was working and going to school. Learning all about the human body, what my future career path would be, learning the true jobs that nurses do. Let’s just say that the folks that are Nurses are pure angels in their own right. Of course, I know there are bad apples here and there. But to do the job long term is an absolute service to others that I don’t think many people understand fully. It is a VERY stressful and selfless job.

Fast forward to graduation, I had decided my path forward would be critical care. I wanted to work with the sickest patients. At the time, before working in an Emergency Department or Intensive Care Unit, you needed to work at a lower acuity unit first to essentially ‘earn the right’. I worked on a medical surgical floor at a small hospital dealing with a mix of surgical patients and medical patients who just needed short stays in the hospital. This was a good unit to hone in on my skills. I truly did enjoy this job but after 9 months, I was offered a position on the Respiratory Intensive Care Unit at a level 1 trauma center. This was everything I had wanted. Timeline here is early 2019!

Working this position at the beginning of 2019 to early 2020, I absolutely loved it. I loved the team, I loved taking care of the patient population, I loved the critical care aspect, and truly I saw myself growing into this unit and becoming a Critical Care Nurse Practitioner and making this my long term plan. Now lets fast forward to 2020….

COVID hit all of us in a certain way. Some people, COVID helped them find themselves and find hobbies with all of the quarantine time. Some people were directly effected and had themselves or family members hospitalized; living with a lot of unknowns about a virus that was absolutely a mystery to most. Nobody knew what was going on. I even knew some people who thought this was the end of humanity.

Doing A + B, I’m sure some of you can see the position I was in. I was a fairly newer RN working in a large level 1 trauma center on the RESPIRATORY ICU during a RESPIRATORY PANDEMIC. I remember very vividly the sickest patients in the state coming into our ICU, the providers and nurses trying to figure out how to treat this mysterious disease, and being very scared I was going to take this home to myself or my loved ones. My significant other, who I met prior to Nursing School and went through Nursing School with me, was an absolute rock and angel in my life. We both were working inpatient during this time and she was there during some of the hardest times of my life and helped me get through.

In the COVID ICU, essentially every patient there had a breathing tube in, they were on very high oxygen settings, they were in a ‘coma’ basically sedated, many proned (on their stomach as it’s a better breathing position when the lungs are struggling), and some even paralyzed. We were short staffed, under supplied, and death happened EVERYDAY. Understand that in the ICU, death happens often, but during COVID it was ten-fold. I can vividly remember these patients and having multiple resuscitation events sometimes in one 12-hour shift.

I remember the mental toll it was taking seeing so many deaths. I remember being short-staffed and taking care of multiple patients that should have been 1:1 patients (1 Nurse to 1 Patient). I remember ‘pounding’ on so many peoples chests (CPR) that some of them I had talked to days prior. I remember seeing people even younger than I am die. I remember the hospital administration not letting family members in because they didn’t want to spread the virus and then their family members passing away with no-one by their sides except us. I remember seeing senior staff dropping like flies and I became a ‘senior staff’ at 2-3 years of nursing experience. I remember the hospital system stopping 401k matches because ‘the loss of revenue’. I also remember the tactics the hospital system was taking to make it appear like we were ‘fully staffed’ but truly was just a band-aid solution and didn’t even make any sense.

TO BE CONTINUED