Hello all! Welcome back to the blog. For this post, I will be sharing five things I dislike as a new graduate nurse in the emergency room. Keep reading if you are interested.

The opinions in this post do not refelect the entirety of nursing, nor the views of my employer. This post is made to document my journey through nursing.

MY TERRIBLE SCHEDULE.

Despite what you may think the schedule is anything but flexible. In fact, my department claims “self scheduling” with a requirement of every other weekend and two on calls per schedule. No matter what I request I usually receive the bad end. It seems as if my schedule is just made to fill in whenever the department is short and not when requested. Since switching to night shifts, I barely have any days off because of the way my nights are scheduled. We are always told “It is to meet the needs of the department”.

Honestly, I don’t care about the department especially when I have laid out my scheduling concerns early. I also have no problem voicing my concern because at the end of the day nursing is not my priority in life. I want balance and being there almost every night of my life takes a toll on my mental health because this is not a job I enjoy.

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE YOUNG NURSES.

Where I work is very clique-y. Some shifts are full of a lot of young nurses who have been there for two years straight out of nursing school and now think they are a gift to the world. These nurses swear up and down “We are a team in the ER” and then you overhear them dragging you in the mud. True story… One thing I have never done is bully a coworker because you don’t know what people are going through.

We all have to start somewhere and two years as a nurse does give you any right to pick on someone else. This actually happened to me after returning from bereavement and I was just too tired to clap back. Yes, I was moving slow and drowning, but I had the sickest patients and I was jetlagged from a twenty seven hour flight (this was following a my emergency bereavement leave). Now that I am on night shift, I don’t deal with this as much because the teamwork is better. I hate nursing culture; I always have since nursing school.

MY PATIENTS.

Yes, I said it. The majority of my patients are pretty ungrateful and think the ER is a hotel. I also can’t stand the creepy old men and the uppity old women who demand you call their son-in-law who is some hotshot executive in another state. I also am getting tired of the patients who talk too much, the patients who come voluntarily but refuse to communicate and the old people who tell me I don’t know anything because I look young. I am also tired of yelling at old people who can’t hear… (Sorry)… I must also mention the “lowkey” racists. I live in the SouthEast and have had many older white patients refuse to acknowledge me as the nurse and be extremely disrespectful… Especially a lot of my COVID patients. Many of them are very entitled….

THE UNPROFESSIONALISM.

One thing I dislike a lot about my job is that I never feel like a “professional”. I feel like a glorified waitress who knows barely anything about human body processes. Needless to say I feel incompetent and most shifts I feel like I performed terribly. I truly feel like nursing is a blue-collar job and not this glorious profession as they strive to make it. People always try to say I am smart because I became a nurse at twenty, but I am never proud to tell people I am a nurse. Anyone can do it and you are easily replaceable. Right now I just feel being a nurse is not a grand accomplishment.

LACK OF RESPECT

The last thing I dislike about being a new ER nurse is the lack of respect. This does not necessarily apply if you are new. I believe this is a applies to nursing in general. I feel the public have no idea of what nurses do and the nursing profession is not doing much to improve this. This may also blend in with my previous thought, but I do feel my patients do not respect me. This may also be due to the fact that I am a young, minority nurse. If you are a minority reading this you will pick up on what I am saying. The whole point of my rambling is to say I don’t feel like the job is respectable. I usually feel degraded at work.

Those are the five things I dislike about being a nurse right now. These are all things I was aware of prior to entering the nursing field, but I just wanted to share my experience. Being a new grad in the middle of a pandemic is anything but enjoyable. Thanks for reading!