Botox and Bollocks - Growing Pains

I’m a bit cheesed off with nursing at the moment. My last few agency shifts have left me feeling deflated, like I was just going through the motions and ticking all the boxes on the endless paperwork, just waiting for my shift to end. Nothing is challenging me anymore. I feel stuck. 

I met up with some of my mates from nurse training this week in our usual haunt and, as always, we got onto the subject of work. We always do this and it gets to be a bit of a ‘who’s got the biggest balls’ competition - honestly, if I said I had a pet elephant, one of them would say they had a box to put it in. 

So, I turned up dressed to kill in my usual sloppy jumper and even sloppier jeans. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a pair of those skinny jeans but can’t quite get my head round skinny anything in a size 16, and anyway, I don’t want to look like the pet elephant if you get my drift. I digress. 

They were all there waiting for me and drinking cocktails that resembled the contents of Mr N’s catheter bag after his TURP op the other week. I was sticking to a pint of Old Peculiar having found that a couple of them prepared the stomach nicely for a trip to the kebab shop. 

The talk soon turned to ‘shop’. 

Smug Sue finished off telling us her long and boring tale of assisting the neurosurgeon in theatre this week, although the way she went on you’d have thought the surgeon was passing her the tools and she was wiring up the brain. Then Boring Brandon jumped in to brag about his selection for ‘Grad School’. Apparently, the private care home company he works for offer a fast track management scheme and I couldn’t help thinking that the only reason he had been chosen was because the residents all fell into a coma when faced with his cardboard cut-out personality. 

Then they all looked at me. 

I just knew what was coming. ‘Have you found a proper job yet then Flo or are you still bumming around doing agency nursing’. I’d never much liked Smug Sue but at that moment I realised that she had one of those faces that I’d never get sick of slapping. 

I smiled sweetly and told them that I was more than happy doing what I was doing and that I was gaining loads of experience while I considered the field of nursing I really wanted to pursue. They looked at me as though I had two heads and I swear even Boring Brandon looked sorry for me. To be fair, I didn’t even convince myself so it wasn’t a surprise that they weren’t going to buy my bull.

The evening then went from bad to worse as before I knew it, they’d all promoted themselves to positions I didn’t even know existed. Smug Sue was Chief Miracle Worker of the Brain Surgeons Superior Nurses Society and Brandon was CEO of Perfect and Smug Care Homes Ltd. Even Drippy Dina was Super Matron of the entire NHS, yet I remained Agency Nurse un-extraordinaire. 

I trudged home feeling a tad depressed. Actually I must have been proper peed off to have walked straight past the takeaway but I just wanted to kick my shoes off and watch some dross on the TV. 

But no. Time for action. 

I fired up the old laptop as soon as I got home, entered ‘jobs for nurses’ into google and I was shocked at how many results came up. 

It was a bit overwhelming if I’m honest. There were a million jobs out there and I could take my pick from brain surgery to botox. I never even realised there was such a range of jobs for nurses and they all sounded a hell of a lot sexier, than working for an agency in a nursing home. 

However, after reading a dozen job descriptions and looking at all the different job titles and imagining myself in a wide variety of different roles, I realised none of them were for me. 

The bottom line is I like working with older people. I like elderly care and all the specialist skills of wound care, dementia care and palliative care that go with it. I might not fraternise with published surgeons or get to learn management jargon (what is low hanging fruit anyway?) but I like to think I make a difference to the often-forgotten generation. In the homes, I don’t have a million doctors to call on or a super-matron holding my hand. I have to think on my feet and make decisions that can carve the future of someone’s well-being. 

I’ve learnt more about the history of our country from the residents I’ve met than I learnt from any teacher at school. I’ve learnt to knit, to play the mouth organ and to dance the fox trot. More than anything, I’ve learnt that nursing within a care home is a speciality in itself and I now want to make that my future. 

No more half measures. No more coasting along. I have to do something to advance my career, at least now I know for sure that I am in the right nursing speciality. 

Time to move on? Not at all, just time to grow up.