For years, probably since the beginning of my nursing career, I had envisioned a time when, for whatever reason, I would no longer be doing bedside nursing. My dream “retirement job” has always been some form of telephone triage and today I have achieved that goal. The only down side is that it is temporary while I work the BCG fatigue out of my system.
My light duty is to cover the Covid symptom line for employee health. Employees that think they may have been exposed or that are having worrying symptoms call the number and I read down this whole list of questions to determine if they should get tested, if they need to quarantine and for how long, when they can go back to work, etc.
The charting is kind of a pain, but I am sitting at home in a dark, quiet room with my laptop and an algorithm/decision support tool and I don’t have to see another person or even change out of my pajamas. This is as close to a dream job as I am ever likely to get.
Edited to add; I was feeling pretty good today, like almost back to normal. Then I took the trash out (not something I usually struggle with) and am pretty seriously beat down again. When I stopped to think, I realized that probably why I felt good is that I hadn’t really done anything all day. 8 hours of “work” talking to people on the phone while I was lying in bed, leftovers for dinner so I didn’t have to cook anything, then sat around for a few hours generally being a slug.
The light duty is probably a really good idea.