Member-only story
Your co-workers are not your friends
I learned the hard way
When I worked at the hospital, almost all my friends were nurses. We hung out after work; we went to happy hour, we all partied together. Unfortunately, it is normal nurse behavior.
As a staff nurse, you are all on the same playing field unless you are the manager or working your way up the clinical ladder, as we say.
You would notice those nurses never hung out with the regular staff, maybe a quick drink, and then they were off.
I never wondered about it until now, after years, and from what happened to me.
Staff nursing is so much different than working in a specialized unit. At one point in my career, I worked in Interventional Radiology; it is a very small unit; there were only 4 or 5 of us nurses at a time, and we had IR techs and doctors.
I thought it was like the floor; we all are friends, go out, and confide in each other, and no one ever hears about our secrets or who we secretly like or don’t like on the unit. On the floor, there were over 20 or 30 nurses, plus management, plus techs, plus a ton of doctors; IR was less, much less.
When I started working there, I liked it mainly because I did not have to do the heavy lifting, and…
