Archives for August 2011

Well it looks like my husband is going to lose more hours at work soon. Yes, on top of the four weeks of temporary lay offs that he has scattered throughout the year (the next one coming up in a week!) he’s going to lose a day each week.

He’s losing hours because his boss believed one of his co-workers when he said that he’d work weekends because he was going to go back to school so she hired another part time recovery room attendant, but the guy who said that he was going to go back to school suddenly decided at the last minute that he wasn’t prepared to go back to school so now the manager has too many employees. So who looses in this … my husband and this other older gentleman who really needs the shifts!

So my husband volunteered to work the weekend shifts in the O.R. as well as his new “three” shift work week in the recovery room. In the end he’ll probably end up working at least five days a week or more, plus get paid some “On Call” time.

When he’s “On Call” he could get called in in the middle of the night to come in to the O.R. to transfer a patient from a stretcher to a bed and or move them to a floor after surgery. If he’s really lucky he might end up going in to work for as little as 20 minutes and getting paid for 4 hours as he has to get paid for a minimum of four hours if he’s called in. Oh and the best part is we live five minutes from the hospital – that’s walking distance – so if he gets called in in the middle of the night he could be there in just a few minutes and home again fairly quickly – perhaps back in bed within half an hour of receiving the call.

So on Monday he starts getting trained as an O.R. attendant. I’m not sure exactly what the job entails but I guess he’ll need to make sure the supplies are stocked up, and that the point of care carts are in place – just like he does in the recovery room. He’ll also be helping during surgeries at times – holding patients and moving them before and after surgeries from bed to stretcher and so on. I’m sure his years of working in the Recovery Room will come in handy and the job will be similar – not totally the same, but similar, plus he already knows most of the staff that he’ll be working with as they are the same that he works with in the Recovery Room.

So .. until we’re sure that he’s actually getting the same or more hours we’re tightening up on our budget and hoping for the best. It certainly didn’t sound very good when Chris came home with the news a week ago, but if the O.R. shifts work out things might really be looking up! We’ll see – cautiously optimistic for now.