Ugh, Awake my foot is freaking hurting.  Not the left one I screwed up last summer, the other one. So much that it broke into my existence, and now it is the forefront of pain.  A cramp, maybe? One of my colleagues suggests issues with electrolytes; perhaps life is subtly telling me to take care of myself.

I file this under “the things you do when you wake up/can’t sleep in the middle of the night.”    Oh well, hopefully, the pain decreases.

Have you ever noticed where your brain goes when you have no one to converse with?  I mean, I have Pax, but I really must be at the good stuff if he will talk back.  The thought that that dog has a pretty good idea of what I am thinking is keen, though.

So, I went back to the past.  Thomas Wolfe said, “you can never go home again.” While this isn’t going home, it is a trip back to places I have lived. Most were an experience that I look back and think, how the fuck did I make it out of there and why we didn’t bail sooner.

I went to school in Butte, MT as an undergrad at Montana Tech.  Tech is an engineering school, and nurses were an “adjustment” to science and coursework. The first couple of classes had a rough go because to keep engineering accreditation, even the nursing program needed to meet some basic requirements.  One of these was tech writing, which thankfully, has paid in spades. The husbear is a chemist by degree, and one of the trona mines near Green River courted him heavily.  Since the money was super good, we moved there…

Yesterday was the anniversary of Matthew Sheppard’s death.  Something we thought of often in our prep to and subsequent move to Wyoming. We didn’t have any moments there, just a general shock to find out the “gays” were in town. Anyway, I was not as lucky on landing the mega paying job.  I worked at the hospital in Rock Springs, which was one step above a skilled nursing facility in honesty.  If a patient was serious, they went to Salt Lake. Anywhooo

I went looking at old stuff.

First off at the hospital in Rock Springs.  Weird to see the changes there.

As I left, the Hospital Admin was in a shake-up after the manager of the hospital stores (the folks that maintain supplies) was bilking the hospital for millions through a contract scheme. I don’t think the administrator was in on it, but he was at the helm and had “full confidence” in the treasurer. They both lost their jobs, and I think she and her hubby faced charges for it.  As I am looking at the hospital administration, I see many familiar faces much older and then, interestingly, a person who committed Medicare fraud on the “leadership team” (maybe they overlooked that). She had illegally billed Medicare on several occasions as a home health agency.  The result was about 300-500k, I think. Good for her, I guess. She was a snake for a boss and should probably not be working in healthcare. Funny part is that she still looks the same age, but then she did work with a plastic surgeon to bring those kind of beautification procedures to Rock Springs.

Ric Scott (Former Florida Governor and Now Senator from Florida) was allowed to continue running a hospital chain after his fraud. The entire leadership team at the hospital looks to be heavy on the Karen side (at least in their photos).  I am not sure even Karens are as bad as the head nurse when I worked medicine there. She used to come screaming onto the unit because she smelled popcorn. She would throw a fit, make the person throw it out, and then everyone got a lecture on how insensitive we were to our patients held NPO (Latin “nil per os,” English nothing by mouth, hey everyone learns something, right?) She would direct this berating at the entire staff.

I guess it is good to be consistent? In all, the hospital was stagnant on any clinical standard. She also insisted that every nurse had to work two years of med-surg. Like I said, nothing but the bitchy old side of nursing. The kind that I ran into throughout my time as a nurse there. I was injured on med-surg because there were no lift protocols and the family wanted dad to be independent of mechanical lifts.

The worst was the county/state health department and public health in Green River.  Fucking worse than Karen, a Janet.

Janet was as fake as her dye job.  I see now she has dark hair (I stalked her facebook, sue me).  At the time, she was a dirty blonde (dunno why I said that, just bizarre 3 am observations I guess). Janet was one of the biggest non-supportive nosiest bitches in the health department.  I saw that she is now teaching new nurses and grad school nurses. She has a DNP (not a nurse practitioner).  Good for her; I hope she teaches her students that being a suspicious bitch and continuously calling the manager is no way to succeed in nursing.  This is the kind of person who had high school-aged daughters that were both cheerleaders (a cheer mom).

She spent a great deal of time at the local schools and was pretty “wired” into them—small town, easy to strut around, especially if your daughters were cheerleaders (status symbol, we all live vicariously through are children, I guess.

I was responsible for infectious disease, STI’s, HIV, and such and often had HS aged kids come to test.  She positioned her desk so she could see patients enter the lobby.  More than a few parents found out from her that their kids were at the health department (and why).

Even better, when it came to school contacts, I was forbidden to go, and in my place went Janet. She would call the county manager (who strangely had her hand in the coffers also (She was embezzling from Medicare and the county) and report anything that she thought I shouldn’t be doing. I was in trouble because I listened to her through the office walls one time and the manager (a bi-polar Karen) caught me. Oops. Leave early for lunch, a call. Leave early for day, even 5 mins, she’d call. Her hubby was oil field trash anyway, and it looks like she has moved around to all the oil field hot spots. BTW she does have a Karen haircut, even though she is a Janet.

This kids is why I hate fucking nurses.  This kind of bullshit that is pulled on new nurses or even nurses who are naïve to a system.  When they say nurses eat their young, they mean it.  Most will try to crawl on top you to make you look worse than them.

I realized that I don’t miss that shit.  Yeah, I am catty about the experience. A lot of it had to do with who I chose to love (especially with Janet), my naivete as a new nurse, and of course, my ever-prevalent PTSD (which often makes me a handful to deal with). The reaction increases in cases where there is even perceived bias towards me).

I went on to better things, way freaking better things.  I got some semi-effective treatment for my PTSD.  I gained experience, and I am an FNP these days. I think I made a better place for myself.  Now, if my freaking foot would stop hurting, and I could relax again.

Be the kind of person your dog and your mom hope you are.