Apologies for the formatting as I’m on my phone and this may be a long one!
So after I (27F) graduated university six years ago, I fell into a job role as a Hospital Administrator. Office jobs with upward mobility are kinda rare in my little corner of the UK. I started with a telephone job where I was a verbal punching bag for people on the NHS waiting list for Orthopaedic Surgery. My supervisors were useless and could barely work the computer systems, they never had our backs with management and they certainly never stood up for us. I worked hard for years to get better and climb up because I wanted to help people. I wanted to help implement new regulations and changes to make Elective surgeries more obtainable for the people who needed it. I ended up going up a pay band and gaining more experience and knowledge to the point where I was the go-to for everything in my department. In hindsight, this was messed up for them to do on my pay grade. Then we got hit with the ‘rona.
As I work in Scheduled Care my job essentially became useless with the pandemic. Planned surgeries went down like the Titanic and waiting lists ground to a halt. The managers were in a pissing contest with each other. Who can look the best? Who is redeploying the most amount of staff? Who is the most useful? My managers got the best treat of all, a 25 year old girl who was extremely naive, wanted to help people, and knew the computer systems inside and out. I got sent as admin support to ICU for seven months. My manager probably got a lot of praise for sending me there.
I watched people die, I held the nurses hands when they cried and made them tea to try and cheer them up. I had to give bereaved family members their loved ones stuff in a fucking plastic bag and tell them not to open it for 72 hours. I sat in full PPE during a heat wave and scanned too many death certificates to the registrar office that I can count. A lot of people had it worse than me, I know, but I was haunted.
After things started to die down, I got put up for a promotion to run an outpatient contract with a private hospital to help reboot elective services. I was excited, my hard work was paying off and I was on my way up – I could finally have the money to move out and get married to my boyfriend. I could help more people.
However, it wasn’t really a promotion, that was a lie. I did the job for a year and a half before I got my pay increase. I ran a whole external outpatient service on under £20.000 a year. I finally got my pay increase end of October 2021 after a massive uphill battle. Worse off, I had to interview for it against two other candidates when I was already in the role! As soon as I had my new contract, I felt something shrivel up inside me. For the last four months I’ve been broken. Every email takes a massive amount of effort to respond to. I do the bare minimum every day and I’ve been making a lot of mistakes. This isn’t me, I’m a very hard worker and I feel guilty every day that I’m like this now. I’m worried someone is going to notice how bad I am and I will lose my job. I’ve burnt out. Hard. Although I’m disappointed in myself and I’m scared there’s a slither of pleasure in my heart. Good. Use me like I’m nothing then I’ll sit here and play on my phone for the majority of the week and take what I can. Sorry for the really long post. I feel like I wanted to get this off my chest and that some people here might understand.
Mostly, I want to get back to the productive person I was. With rising costs of living – I still can’t afford to move out, even with the pay increase. What is the point anymore?