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Antiwork

Health Care?

To get my foot in the door as a new nurse practitioner I applied to a retail clinic in my area. After I was hired, I quickly found out my boss at the time had the reputation of being a complete asshole. I also took the job within a month or two of when my wife was supposed to give birth to my second child and therefore had no work leave built up to allow much of any time with my newborn and wife after the birth. They did allow 2 weeks of unpaid time off after the birth and started pestering me to return after 1.5 weeks. Around 1 month later I must have caught norovirus or some other heinous viral GI bug from a patient at work. I came home that night after my shift started feeling extremely ill, spiked a 103 degree fever, vomiting/diarrhea (the whole shebang)…


To get my foot in the door as a new nurse practitioner I applied to a retail clinic in my area. After I was hired, I quickly found out my boss at the time had the reputation of being a complete asshole. I also took the job within a month or two of when my wife was supposed to give birth to my second child and therefore had no work leave built up to allow much of any time with my newborn and wife after the birth. They did allow 2 weeks of unpaid time off after the birth and started pestering me to return after 1.5 weeks.

Around 1 month later I must have caught norovirus or some other heinous viral GI bug from a patient at work. I came home that night after my shift started feeling extremely ill, spiked a 103 degree fever, vomiting/diarrhea (the whole shebang) and was laid up in bed that night. I called out early the next morning to my boss who keeps me on the phone trying to convince me to try to go to work. I replied “are you telling me to go to work with a 103 degree fever?!”, he pauses, thinks for a second and says “no, that's not what I'm saying” (I'm guessing he understood the the liability involved sending a sick employee to work to get patients sick). He continues to keep me on the line trying to get me to change my mind but I end up staying home for the day. I was not scheduled to work the next day but my condition continued to deteriorate unable to eat or drink fluids, high fever etc. The next day I was barely able to make it from the bed to the toilet under my own power. Realizing how bad a shape I was in, my wife calls my boss for me and she tells him the situation. He whines about having to find coverage and my wife says “give me the numbers” I'll find the coverage” and he tells her “no that's my job”. He keeps her on the phone and proceeds to tell her, “I'm a man, I haven't taken a day off work in the past 6 years, maybe all your husband needs is a stiff whiskey”. My wife lost it on him and told him I'm not coming in. He then tells her that I will need a doctor's note to come back to work. So I go to urgent care sick as a dog, with my 1 month old in the back seat/wife (putting them at risk of getting sick). My blood pressure 80/40 (dehydrated to all hell) and end up in a proper ER for IV fluids that night.

I wrote a long email to the vice president of the clinics about how unprofessional my boss had been and said they will talk to my boss about the situation but nothing happened to him. The clinic and this boss ended up parting ways 3-4 months later (not sure if it was due to all the complaints about him?) but ended up throwing him a expensive goodbye party before he left after being a terror to all his subordinates. Working in healthcare is a shit show. Zero stars, do not recommend.

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