I am on the right path, what next?

I have always been the girl with the plan. Since I was 6 I always knew what I wanted to do. It changed a few time as children do what I always wanted be something medical. When I was 6, I wanted to be a doctor, when I got to secondary school for a little while I wanted be a teacher, but then went back to be wanting to be a paramedic. When I got to 16 I wanted to be something cool, and to me my dad was the coolest so I wanted to be a sound and light engineer. But again I went back to wanting to be a paramedic or nurse. In the end I settled on nursing. I looked at university, and was dead set on it.

My a-levels were not great due to lack of support at school, but luck had it I got into university anyway. I completed my 3 years training with some good time, some very stressful times and some bad times, and came out with 2:1 in adult nursing.

Since I qualify I have had 3 different jobs in 2 years. I first worked on an acute admission unit, busy, stressful; it always felt more like I was pushing beds then caring for patients. It was always more important to move the patient to the ward and get your next one from A&E so that A&E did not get blocked and they could get the next person off the ambulance. Which of course is important but it never felt I was caring for patients the way I wanted to, so I moved on.

As a student I always wanted to work in the acute section, I did A&E as a placement and loved it but I always wanted to try to work on critical care. So off I went to critical care. The unit I work on was a big unit, 35 beds, 11 of them side rooms. The team I worked with was very supportive and helpful. It was a great working environment. The problem with CCU was your looking after the sickest of the sick, yes this can be very rewarding but it can always be very depressing. We got a lot of cancer patient on our unit and some people never recovered, you work so hard to try and get these people well again but despite all the hard of the team and yourself they still pass away. I found working there very hard for this reason. It was stressful and depressing. The people I worked with are brilliant and great at their job but that job was not for the one for me.

Now I moved on to working in the community, I now work as part of the district nurse time as a community staff nurse. I prefer this job, enjoying it more than I enjoy AAU and CCU; but with all of these jobs I had the feeling that I was not quite in it, maybe bored in some way. I am very passion about nursing, my work and helping others, but there must be other ways to do it other than killing yourself to do it. None of the places I worked including now was fully staff; the workload kept getting heavy and the quite period that use to happen around the summer time rarely seen anymore. With no reward for the nurses that stick it out and more leaving because of burn out and stress.

Now I find myself wondering if I have pick the correct career for myself. Should I have done something more creative? Or done something that helps people in a different way, where I did not feel like I am killing myself do so. I am now not sure I have a plan. Do I want to forge a path in this career?

I have been thinking about changing career path to one of my other passion. Do more writing or an internship in photography, or look at teaching.  There some many different things I could do. I guess I am saying I don’t know what next, and that scares me a lot.