This is my 4th job as a registered nurse in last than 2 years. Thats a tough thing to swallow when your entire motto in life is to ‘never ‘give up’. The hospital was post Covid and the remaining nurses left after a mass exodus of experienced nurses were nothing short of a nightmare crew. One thing was obvious was that too many of my colleagues were entitled and got through school with so many advantages not afforded to the general working class population. Here in Tennessee it became the norm for nurses to show up for their shift with scary bed hair knots piled haphazardly atop their heads, wrinkles scrubs and old makeup that told me they were either “hungover” or simply gave up caring how they appeared each day at work. There was no more morning “huddle” and noone said “good morning” or greeted anyone at the start of each day. The hardest part for me was not just the lack of support or teamwork in my unit but the negative banter that pervaded my every day on every 12 hour shift. These were not nurses who cared about the world and wanted to help others in times of great need. It was alot more talk about how disgusting a patient was or other nurses searching patients family members to find dirt on them in order to put security tags on them and prevent them from entering our unit. We had an elderly women with advanced dementia basically living on our Oncology unit. She was abandoned by family and until the hospital could go to court and get her a court appointed POA, she had been living up there on the 8th floor for about a year. Never getting taken outside to see the light of day other than what shown in her room window, never smelling fresh air or hearing the natural sounds of the world outside the buzzing of call lights and bed alarms and constant fluorescent lighting . It was apparent the rest of the unit staff were beyond fatigued by the demands of an ambulatory dementia patient constantly triggering alarms by the way they yelled at her every time she moved. I would watch the other nurses and they did not even bother to check and see if family members of other patients were around to hear how they talked to this poor women. It was a common reaction by all of them to yell at her to “sit down!” and “get back to your chair or you will fall!” Or “you are driving me bleep bleep crazy damn it!” It made no sense why she was still up on our unit and NOT a cancer patient. It came down to money more than anything. At her age she had enough comorbidities that they justified her need for care in a health facility and i am sure they made alot of money off Medicare for her. When a bed alarm or a chair alarm goes off, the requirement is to get there as fast as you can because it means a patient who is a major fall risk has left the bed or chair and is about to fall. Falls hurt the hospital and are a major liablity. Working short staffed as the nation has been accustomed to by now and being expected to stop what you are doing every 5 minutes to chase an alarm really makes it impossible to give good care much less complete your daily work requirements. What made it even more difficult for me was listening to the way they all talked to this patient (or yelled at her). On that same hall we had a young patient in his mid 20s who was in a horrific car accident and paralyzed from the chest down with limited use of his hands. He was nearly 7 feet tall. He also did not have cancer but had been living there for 9 months because he basically refused to leave until his insurance would pay for a bed for him to return home…. one that supported him better. It took 4 people to move him up in bed and he slid down every hour. He was on his light alot and im sure higher needs than his medical conditions simply due to his size and his unattended mental health issues related to the auto accident that left him a quad. We would consider a day of great luck to have one CNA for the entire unit show up. CNAs were paid pittence because hospitals did not require them to be certified so the pay was too low to gather any interest for the public. In some ways, it made sense why all my nurse colleagues had acquired such bad attitudes considering all this nonsense we endured on the daily. But as a brand new nurse who struggled through the uphill battle of Covid nursing school, i really needed to see just one nurse who acted like they cared about their patients. I really needed to see just one nurse offer support and guidance without throwing so much shade at the new hires. My nurse educator on that floor lived with good money and her one child went to the most prestigious high school in our region. As an educator she was hardly ever there. She vacationed more than she worked. She was in a bad mood one day and began spouting about how her boss is “sick and tired of all these new hires taking 4-6 months to orient into the job and how it has GOT TO STOP!” That was her level of support for all of us trying to work our 12 hour (really 14 hour) shifts while studying for our national boards and only getting grief from our teammates in our new jobs. Our manager would only pop around to take job interviews and to tell us all that we needed to put in more hours “on the floor”. This hospital signed me into multiple training or inservice classes a week and instead of recognizing that is a key issue in losing floor time, she only demanded more time from us “new hires”. I was already putting in 60 hours a week while living in a shed trying to rebuild my homestead after a fire on top of studying for my NCLEX. When i did get time off my body was in so much pain from the long hours running up and down those hallways , i was literally good for nothing else.This work environment was so toxic, they could not keep workers. I also believe that being positive and cheerful made others uneasy on the daily. All the other nurses seemed to want to do was talk smack about everyone from the staff to the patients on our unit. I dreaded going into work every single day. These werent “my people” , this was completely opposite to why i became a nurse. I contemplated quitting for weeks but struggled of the idea of being a quitter 3 months in to my first nursing job. I realized though that the only way to survive this place was to join my colleagues in their bitterness and bad attitudes in order to even come close to “fitting in” and so i made the tough decision to resign in order to say yes to myself and preserve my hopeful attitude as a new nurse even while recognising this is nothing like what we expected it would be. I was going to choose professionalism over “ratchet” even if it meant walking away from any job I had to in order to find a place that valued my presence and my positive approach to being a nurse. Ironically, only after i resigned was anyone at that hospital willing to talk to me. I learned so much valuable skills and information at that job despite the horrors. It gave me a reslience i did not know was needed until i went to other jobs that had their own issues. I agonized and cried but ultimately i walked away with my head held high in hopes of a better path forward. I do not expect nursing in any position will be easy or without great need for positive change. I will keep pressing forward with hope of finding a decent fit for me and a place i can effect that change i wish to see. The world of healthcare desperately needs it.