Baystate Franklin Medical Center is where I work as a nurse. The second floor is where you'll find the amazing OB unit. Baystate, the large corporation that bought Franklin more than 12 years ago, is not friendly to unions and is doing some aggressive union busting right now. They want to cut the nurse's benefits, force them to work past their shift without paying overtime, and continue with the sick policy that forces us to come to work sick.
Sigh.
SO, I dragged myself out of my cozy healing home and went to picket for an hour. It was great to see everyone and feel the support from the community as people joined us in picketing and honked with thumbs-up as they drove by. But it was sad to see the place I think of as a second home and feel such frustration and disconnect. My surgery occurred when the tension was building between the union and management, so I feel a bit guilty for not being there when my co-workers were having such a hard time.
Nursing is a very difficult complicated job. It is rewarding but very draining, too. My regular doctor says that, as far as health and stress, working as a nurse 24 hours a week is the equivalent of working full time at most other jobs. She urges us to work part time and take care of ourselves so we can continue to work and be healthy.
And Florence Nightingale said,
"Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts."
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