verushka70 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
verushka70) wrote2008-02-02 10:02 am
verushka70) wrote2008-02-02 10:02 am
malignant pleural effusion and mean girls
Well, it's back. My mom's cancer. Apparently. Last Friday (1/25) she had a CT scan and it showed there was a big build up of fluid in the pleural space of her right lung. The one that had the lower lobe removed. And there was cavitation in the area of the upper right lobe where she had a wedge resection done to remove a tumor. So the doc wanted her to come in Monday for thoracentesis (when they stick a long needle into you so they can draw off the fluid).
She had the thoracentesis Monday. They removed about a liter of fluid, which we then brought to the doctor's appointment in the afternoon, and he sent it right off to Pathology.
Wednesday we paged the doc's assistants (two RNs) to find out the pathology results. He said Monday, however, he was going to proceed as if it was cancerous because 80% of the time, these pleural effusions have cancer cells in them.
So she started her new chemo -- a drug called Tarceva -- Tuesday 1/29. Actually she was at the doctor's office all damn day. And I was with her, which put the kibosh on going to work that night. Not that I cared. I missed a lot of work.
I became suicidally depressed, too. But that actually had happened before my mom's CT scan on Friday. I want to say "I hate my job" but I don't hate my job. I hate a lot of the women I work with, because for some unknown reason, they have decided they don't like me (though I've never done anything to any of them, ever -- why would I? I'm a new nurse. I need all the advice I can get from experienced nurses). So I'm on the outside, not fitting in. As usual.
Ironically, I had drafted my letter of resignation on Tuesday. But I didn't give it. Yet.
I'm not sure I can really cope with the meanness, spite, and people talking about me behind my back at work -- and my mother's cancer's return, too. I have one friend at work who I can really trust, but we almost never get scheduled together.
I actually had someone at work make fun of me for having a subscription to a nursing journal. For staying up to date on my field.
Which explains a helluva lot about the reputation of our hospital.
I'm looking at this as a means to an end. I always did, thinking "I'll just work here at this crap hospital for a year to get good experience, then I'll get a 'real' job." Because I knew I'd learn a lot because of all the fucked-up shit we see, all the patients we get with chronic un-cared for health problems, the alcoholics having the DTs, the heroin overdoses brought back with Narcan, the gunshot wounds requiring the insertion of a chest tube before they can be transferred to a trauma ER. (We're not a trauma ER -- though you'd never know it. One night, we had three gunshot wounds come in, one right after the other, in less than two hours. One guy shot in the chest (whose lung, surprisingly, didn't collapse), one guy shot in the head (it grazed his skull -- talk about LUCKY), and one guy who got shot in the leg. Must've been a gang war going that night or something.
But I really fucking hate my co-workers. I have had people tell me, "Well, you work in a ghetto hospital. If your co-workers get ghetto on you, you're just going to have to get ghetto back."
What's ironic is that it isn't black nurses who exclude me, gossip about or disparage me behind my back, or shut up when I re-enter the area because they were just talking about me.
It's only the white and Asian women who've made fun of me, gossiped about me, talk about me behind my back. The black nurses and the Mexican nurses are either neutral or friendly. They have their own cliques, I guess.
I don't talk to anyone about it, except my one friend E---. She's the only one who understands. She doesn't understand why they're such cunts to me -- or why people seem to like her, either. Except her sister has worked there for years and everyone likes her sister. So she's liked by association, we figure. Because we're both just as inexperienced and clue-less. (And we're not -- we've both been given really good employee reviews at four months into the job.)
There was one other woman there I graduated with that I thought I could trust. But E--- said she got a really weird vibe about M--- one night when they were working together, and M--- started talking about me and how people don't like me. E--- told me this past Thursday morning when we went out for breakfast that I shouldn't talk to M--- about anything serious anymore, certainly not anything to do with co-workers. "She's turned into one of them," was E---'s verbatim comment. "You can't trust her anymore."
Which I had kind of sensed over the last couple of months, as M--- began to distance herself from me. But it was still disappointing to hear it.
Women suck. I know that's not particularly progressive or feminist to say, but I've never been treated as meanly and cruelly in all my life as I was by girls as a child, and then by women as an adult. I don't regret going into nursing. I just regret that it's a female dominated profession.
I long for the days of my old tech support job, when I worked with a multicultural whirlwind majority of men for whom geekiness and intelligence was attractive, and we argued passionately about politics, world events, and which ethnic restaurant to get lunch from. Those were the happiest workdays of my life. It's all basically been downhill since then in terms of work environments and co-workers.
I liken the viciousness of women in female dominated professions like nursing (and teaching, I've been told by my younger sister who teaches high school) to that phrase about politics in academia -- that it's so vicious because the stakes are so low.
I wonder if I got hired at the VA if I'd have more male co-workers. One can only hope.
ETA:
In the meantime, my mom is taking the Tarceva daily. It's $3700/month if you don't have insurance. My mom's insurance co-pay for it is $22. Which is amazing, considering that her Protonix (for GERD) costs about $250/month, and her co-pay for that is $88. The complexities and illogic of insurance co-pays and what they will and won't cover are beyond me.
So, the main side effect thus far has been diarrhea. Slight nausea. But my mom hasn't experienced anything terrible yet. Oh, and her skin itches like crazy on her forehead. The doc told us that people who get a rash from Tarceva tend to respond to the drug -- 9 out of 10 times. (The response rate, total, is about 20-some percent. Not really good, but...)
So, we're hoping my mom will get the skin rash. As weird as that sounds. Because in this case rash=yay it's working.
She had the thoracentesis Monday. They removed about a liter of fluid, which we then brought to the doctor's appointment in the afternoon, and he sent it right off to Pathology.
Wednesday we paged the doc's assistants (two RNs) to find out the pathology results. He said Monday, however, he was going to proceed as if it was cancerous because 80% of the time, these pleural effusions have cancer cells in them.
So she started her new chemo -- a drug called Tarceva -- Tuesday 1/29. Actually she was at the doctor's office all damn day. And I was with her, which put the kibosh on going to work that night. Not that I cared. I missed a lot of work.
I became suicidally depressed, too. But that actually had happened before my mom's CT scan on Friday. I want to say "I hate my job" but I don't hate my job. I hate a lot of the women I work with, because for some unknown reason, they have decided they don't like me (though I've never done anything to any of them, ever -- why would I? I'm a new nurse. I need all the advice I can get from experienced nurses). So I'm on the outside, not fitting in. As usual.
Ironically, I had drafted my letter of resignation on Tuesday. But I didn't give it. Yet.
I'm not sure I can really cope with the meanness, spite, and people talking about me behind my back at work -- and my mother's cancer's return, too. I have one friend at work who I can really trust, but we almost never get scheduled together.
I actually had someone at work make fun of me for having a subscription to a nursing journal. For staying up to date on my field.
Which explains a helluva lot about the reputation of our hospital.
I'm looking at this as a means to an end. I always did, thinking "I'll just work here at this crap hospital for a year to get good experience, then I'll get a 'real' job." Because I knew I'd learn a lot because of all the fucked-up shit we see, all the patients we get with chronic un-cared for health problems, the alcoholics having the DTs, the heroin overdoses brought back with Narcan, the gunshot wounds requiring the insertion of a chest tube before they can be transferred to a trauma ER. (We're not a trauma ER -- though you'd never know it. One night, we had three gunshot wounds come in, one right after the other, in less than two hours. One guy shot in the chest (whose lung, surprisingly, didn't collapse), one guy shot in the head (it grazed his skull -- talk about LUCKY), and one guy who got shot in the leg. Must've been a gang war going that night or something.
But I really fucking hate my co-workers. I have had people tell me, "Well, you work in a ghetto hospital. If your co-workers get ghetto on you, you're just going to have to get ghetto back."
What's ironic is that it isn't black nurses who exclude me, gossip about or disparage me behind my back, or shut up when I re-enter the area because they were just talking about me.
It's only the white and Asian women who've made fun of me, gossiped about me, talk about me behind my back. The black nurses and the Mexican nurses are either neutral or friendly. They have their own cliques, I guess.
I don't talk to anyone about it, except my one friend E---. She's the only one who understands. She doesn't understand why they're such cunts to me -- or why people seem to like her, either. Except her sister has worked there for years and everyone likes her sister. So she's liked by association, we figure. Because we're both just as inexperienced and clue-less. (And we're not -- we've both been given really good employee reviews at four months into the job.)
There was one other woman there I graduated with that I thought I could trust. But E--- said she got a really weird vibe about M--- one night when they were working together, and M--- started talking about me and how people don't like me. E--- told me this past Thursday morning when we went out for breakfast that I shouldn't talk to M--- about anything serious anymore, certainly not anything to do with co-workers. "She's turned into one of them," was E---'s verbatim comment. "You can't trust her anymore."
Which I had kind of sensed over the last couple of months, as M--- began to distance herself from me. But it was still disappointing to hear it.
Women suck. I know that's not particularly progressive or feminist to say, but I've never been treated as meanly and cruelly in all my life as I was by girls as a child, and then by women as an adult. I don't regret going into nursing. I just regret that it's a female dominated profession.
I long for the days of my old tech support job, when I worked with a multicultural whirlwind majority of men for whom geekiness and intelligence was attractive, and we argued passionately about politics, world events, and which ethnic restaurant to get lunch from. Those were the happiest workdays of my life. It's all basically been downhill since then in terms of work environments and co-workers.
I liken the viciousness of women in female dominated professions like nursing (and teaching, I've been told by my younger sister who teaches high school) to that phrase about politics in academia -- that it's so vicious because the stakes are so low.
I wonder if I got hired at the VA if I'd have more male co-workers. One can only hope.
ETA:
In the meantime, my mom is taking the Tarceva daily. It's $3700/month if you don't have insurance. My mom's insurance co-pay for it is $22. Which is amazing, considering that her Protonix (for GERD) costs about $250/month, and her co-pay for that is $88. The complexities and illogic of insurance co-pays and what they will and won't cover are beyond me.
So, the main side effect thus far has been diarrhea. Slight nausea. But my mom hasn't experienced anything terrible yet. Oh, and her skin itches like crazy on her forehead. The doc told us that people who get a rash from Tarceva tend to respond to the drug -- 9 out of 10 times. (The response rate, total, is about 20-some percent. Not really good, but...)
So, we're hoping my mom will get the skin rash. As weird as that sounds. Because in this case rash=yay it's working.
no subject
In any case, love you. max
no subject
I have a friend who's a nurse and she's said pretty much the same thing you've said about nursing, about how toxic it is unless you've got a really strong ego to deal with all the head games.
She's moved from several places, one of which was the VA. She hated the VA with a passion. She said of all the places she worked it was the most frustrating because of how few resources are available for the patients. She's told some real horror stories about that place.
All in all, you have to look out for yourself. I'm glad you've got at least one person to talk to about it, but if the job is making you that miserable, I'd be looking elsewhere. With a nursing shortage, you should be able to find something else and, hopefully, it'll be better.
no subject
also sorry to hear about the crap at your work... its not right that your coworkers alienate you and make you feel so alone and depressed. thats just bullshit. in my experience, i would MUCH rather work with men than women. it may be a generalization, but guys tend to air things out and talk straight, whereas a lot of women scheme and play mind games and find acceptance in little nasty gossip circles. it makes no sense. guys compete with one another, but women do it in a much more degrading, psychological-torture type of way. it is a very unhealthy atmosphere, one that has put me in hospital from stress before [stress manifests in my belly, and ive had more than one surgery because of it]. i wont let it happen again. my life is too short and too precious to me to let me get run down by people who dont matter in the long run. i was suidical and very depressed, and afterwards i realized how much the situation was killing me, how much it ran me down and drained me and made me feel helpless and useless. and im NOT. im a strong, bright, helpful, kind person! and so are you!
its easy for me to say, because you have to do the work and not me, but if i were you i would find a way out of there. its affecting you in many ways, some of which you may find out too late. and with the added stress of your moms illness, something is going to snap, your body or your mind. your coworkers have no right to make you feel like that. if you dont look out for yourself, your health, your mental health, your balance, no one else will. *hugs*
no subject
And the shitty coworker situation sucks righteously, too, so I'm sending you good vibes for that as well, whether you decide to stick through it and save it up as something you can use, or move on to an environment more healthy and beneficial for you. It's good you have someone to watch out for you. It unfair that so many women are deceptive and vicious, while guys are generally pretty up front if they're going to act like jerks. I've only ever known one guy to be a downright venomous douche to someone without provocation (and he was bona fide crazy), but the list of women goes on pretty much indefinitely.