No.

I don't get it.

Had a friend almost-crying on my shoulder today. This is perfectly okay; I've offered a shoulder before. She's a good person. She's a good nurse.

She's got some health stuff goin on. Big stuff. Medical leave stuff. It's not new, it's several years that she's been dealing with this stuff. She wants to scale back to two days a week instead of three a week and she needs to do this. It's not up for discussion that she needs to do it. She has stunningly obvious medical reasons that require her to take it easy.

I mean. This is not optional.

She applied for a job at SomeOtherHospital. Got the job, turned the offer down on the promise from her supervisor that "Oh, yeah, we can scale you back to two shifts a week." This morning, said supervisor backpedalled. "Well, that would be part time, and I don't really have a part-time position available."

I hear the tail end of this conversation, and Supervisor goes to office, and Friend looks like she's about to crack, but says nothing. Friend takes me walking, tells me.

My words of advice: "Well. You can say to Supervisor that if she can't make it work, you'll be taking a leave of absence." Friend: "I don't want to threaten." Me: "Who said 'threaten'? You need time off. This isn't a choice for Supervisor to make, this has nothing to do with her. If she can't 'create a part-time position', okay, that's fine. She cannot create a new position for you to be. You can therefore leave for three months and she's required to keep your full-time job open for you. You get your time off. She gets the logical consequence for making an asinine management decision. Meanwhile, you can look for a part-time job for a nurse of your caliber and have a line of people wanting to hire you for two days a week."

Friend wrings hands. Friend is still thinking she's going to "threaten" and nice nurses don't threaten.

No threaten. Do. (Like Yoda says.)

How is this up for discussion?

In what cockamamie universe is this not a JOB, people? With FMLA rights the same as those given to every other working, taxpaying citizen of the United States? And where is it not okay to vote with your feet when you're working for someone unreasonable? When is your health optional? Why should a nurse feel guilty when some person with deplorable management skills is managing-by-taking-advantage-of-you?

I can't say this doesn't happen in the business world because it does. But most not-nurse people know that the sacrifices and the blood and guts these people put out ...are not rewarded. They do not have a saintly home. They have lives of missed soccer games and dance recitals and missed weddings and missed deaths and a whole lot of things that Could Have Been.

This is why I walked away from my $75/hr gig in Tijuana, Mexico, to be with my grandfather when he died. I do not regret it. A woman that was my friend told me at the time, "I don't understand this...I don't know anybody that close to their grandfather....You should have cleared this trip with me first" ("Ask the cancer eating his body alive if it can come back another time, M. Because I'd really it rather not kill him now, either.")

My point of this little anecdote is to point out that I am astonished to see how people cannot fathom that a job is just a job. It isn't your life. It is more than okay to regard it as just a job. It's important to have goals at work, professional goals, but it's not okay to put that first when it's your health, or your family's.

Duh.

According to some book I read, part of this is generational. That a job is just a job. People of Generation X, this doofy tome says, have learned that it's important to balance work and life, and not live to work as previous generations have done.

My friend is older than me. But not so not-my-generation that she doesn't hear me. That she doesn't hear the sense of what I say to her. Just enough older to feel guilty that I might be right. Just enough older that, I'm afraid, she may accept the terms she's been given and let her health get worse.

That guilt is not okay.

No.

It's an easy word. It really is.

You are not a hero for picking up 17 shifts in a row because "they can't find anybody." Guess what? They really won't find anybody if you're willing to be the beast of burden. You will never go down in the history book of What A Fabulous Person because you took it all on yourself. You are not Abandoning Your Patients. You are not a bad nurse for needing to take care of your health.

You became a nurse to help people, and you do.

The world is an endless spiral of suffering that increases exponentially. With each birth, by 2050, there will be 11 billion of us on this planet and each one of them will suffer horribly. Each withers, sickens, debilitates and will die. You do not stand alone to stop the deluge. You are not the arbiter of the cure.

You need to get a grip. What a nurse does is of immense value. But a broken nurse stops the suffering of no one. Even the physicians say to heal thyself. Why don't nurses do that?

No.

Just. No.

Say it with me now.