venting

Last week was particularly difficult for me at work. I feel like that's all I say when I talk about work and that it's been that way since sometime in December. We've been really busy and I've been feeling crushed on both sides. The hospital is full so beds aren't being assigned and then administrators are coming by and asking us to do things I'm sure they feel are simple but they just are not. Patients and family members are worried and nervous and not in the best of moods or very understanding when it comes to not getting the answers they would like. Doctors are frustrated because they aren't getting satisfying answers as to why their patients have to wait for a bed. And then finally, I absolutely know they don't mean it, but the nurses I work with dump on me as much as everyone else sometimes.

One of the nurses is someone I always enjoy talking to because she has a way of either making me laugh at myself or helping me understand the bigger picture without being condescending. I like talking to her about everything really and she's shown me the most about my job by far too. I told her on Thursday that I had just had it. I was sick of being talked to like I'm an idiot or like I'm someone intentionally trying to piss doctors off. I'm sick of people expecting me to pull things out of my ass for them to do their job when they are the ones who forgot whatever it is they need in the first place. I'm sick of getting dumped on by everyone, whether they mean it or not. She just laughed and said I shouldn't care so much. I know. I do. There are times when it doesn't bother me at all. I can let it slide off my back and barely give it another thought. There wasn't any one thing that was such a ridiculous event during the entire week that it wrecked everything. Rather, it was the culmination of events. It was the mulitple comments and complaints, the irritation I fielded, the general piss poor attitudes of those around me.

I am finding myself slipping into a mode where I expect everyone to realize I am a person with genuine feelings and emotions and unfortuantely I feel that as a secretary that is really dangerous. It's not going to happen. For good or bad, most of the time I am the voice on the other end of the phone and I am the body that sits in the chair that is supposed to know everything about anything happening in the unit and most of the rest of the hospital. It has nothing to do with 27 year old Melissa who dreams of a degree in psychology, being married and having babies, and living in a place where it snows in the winter.

On the flip side of that though, I need to realize that the angry doctor in front of me could be angry because one of his favorite patients died yesterday and he couldn't do anything to stop it. The nurse delegating everything she possibly can to me might be having a hard time concentrating because something happend with her kids that morning and she wants to make sure the patients don't feel the reprecussions of it. I don't really think everyone is being bitchy just because they feel like it so I need to stop acting like everything is personal.

Easier said than done.

But I finally feel like the rest of my life is going pretty well again and maybe that can carry me through rough days at work. I'm losing weight and feeling really good about it, money is going pretty well, I get to pick another apartment to live in and go through all my stuff and par down and that's always good, and no matter what happens during the week I get to spend most of the weekend with the love of my life and not much else makes me happier than that.