the greener mile

Coming home from a busy graveyard shift, I was doing some revisions in the resume` I was making and wondered how many of the hundreds of muscles in my body would ache from sheer over use? How many hours of sleep would I be getting today? How busy will the ward be when I resume my duty tonight? Will my liver cirrhotic patient still be there in room 5? Has the leaking faucet in the medication room been fixed? Will we ever get our hazard pay? These are just some of the questions an underpaid, overworked staff nurse of a government hospital entertains, when there is nothing left to do but ask.

Having been employed as a nurse in a government hospital here in our city, people say that I am lucky. The pay is good (at least compared to the private hospitals). I guess so. My college classmates would envy me for being fortunate enough to have entered a government hospital, amidst all the politics involved in their hiring. Fortunate was an understatement. A miracle would be most likely. You see, before being able to consider yourself a government employee, you have to undergo through a lot of process. In our hospital, they require you to undergo a 6-month volunteer training, and when you say volunteer, it means 6 months of unpaid work. But that’s okay, it’s just a means of adding up to my experience, you philosophize. Besides what is six months compared to the years you spent mastering your course? It just one way of fine tuning your skills.

But wait! After the six months is over, you begin applying for the contractual position, since there are no items available for regular. Lucky you! You were hired as a contractual. So you begin to use your hard earned skills and knowledge into practice, only to find out that the ideal is not really applicable in your set up. You start to get frustrated with the limits brought about by lack of facilities and supplies. You begin to notice the endemic understaffing. The heavy workload starts to push your body to the limits. Your calf muscles begin to hurt like hell, varicose veins pop out like the diagrams of the re-routing schemes of the traffic management control, and sometimes because of being too busy, you forget (on purpose) to eat your lunch, not that you had breakfast that morning!

The problems don’t end there. Not yet. You’ll be pestered by supervisors breathing down your neck, trying to jump on every mistake you’ll make as if their life depended on it (not that I have lots of mistakes). Head nurses could also be a pain in the “you know what”, by giving you lots of requirements making you feel like your inside the classroom once again. The doctors. Oh yes! Those white blazer wearing people who only recognizes your presence as a nurse whenever they want to ask for something, or am I generalizing them? I still hope there are those who are an exception to the rule. All these things, the heavy workload and the small compensation you get adds up to your unsatisfaction with your job.

With these scenario in our minds, and with the kind of compensation we get, I do not wonder why I see lots of nurses jumping on every opportunity they see to get out of this predicament. With the nursing profession back in business (abroad, that is!) thousands of Filipino nurses will be flying to United Kingdom, migrating in the US, going for greener pastures to be exact. In our hospital alone, a number of nurses have already made the decision to cross over the greener mile, where opportunities are better and compensation is good.

This reminds me of what I said during my interview for the regular position in our hospital. “Satisfaction in one’s job begins within yourself, if you try to love your work, then it becomes less of a work for you to do your duties….” Thinking about it now I could have kicked myself for being too idealistic I realized that there’s a limit to every person’s satisfaction. Even if you’re quite satisfied with the way things are right now, there will really come a time when you’ll eventually seek for more and reach for more, and if our government is not ready to give us that, where else will we look for it but in foreign lands? Now, where is that resume` I was making?