fiesty, furious and forever gonna speak my mind.

amuse-bouche 

hello folks, 

for all intents and purposes, i type mostly everything (unless it’s formal) in lower case letters. it's kind of my signature. if that bothers you, please create your own blog or keep it moving because i didn't create this blog to get critiqued. i am writing this from my work office where i am currently all caught up on my pre-charting, messages and calls from patients. i miss the possibility of the blank page. i used to have a live journal years ago, but those went by the wayside as quickly as they came. 

i have been wanting to start a food blog for years now and i finally decided to just create one and see what happens. i can't promise i know how to edit the layout because at the moment i don't, but writing has always been second nature to me. when it comes to writing, i have been wordy for as long as i can remember. my college papers always tended to be longer than necessary because i have always had a lot to say. coming from a passionate and opinionated south philly italian family, that's not likely to change any time soon. my text messages alone have given my loved ones agita because i text my thoughts as they come which is not always the best idea...i digress.

the goal of this blog is to share content, most of which i hope will be inspiring, whether that be a great new or favorite restaurant, song, band, concert, recipe, travel experience, etc. join me on this journey as i head into this ever changing, unpredictable world with my many evolving moods. since 8th grade, an old classmate of mine thought he was clever when he dubbed me "furious" because of my last name furia. a little play on words, so to speak. i don't know that i was ever really furious so much as i've always been sensitive and worn my heart on my sleeve. that doesn't get you far in life except disappointed and or hurt, both of which i have been many times throughout my lifetime as i am sure we all have. 

one gripe i have to vent about is workplace violence and its prevalence in healthcare. i have been a nurse for 13 years now and i have worked in a lot of different major hospital systems and one thing that they all seem to have in common is the vicious female species. i don't know what it is about working with other females, but if you ever want to question your entire existence and the career choices you made in life, become a nurse because for the most part, nursing is still predominantly employed by females. if you become a nurse, you will see nurses of ALL ages acting like fools. forget the phrase "nurses eat their young" because nurses of almost any age will take out chunks of other nurses, chew on them and spit them out just for fun. i know because almost every single job i have had in healthcare has been this way. that's not to say i am a perfect person, employee or that i have never made mistakes in my career because that's not true. for the MOST part i have always been a relatively positive and good-natured person. if you appear weak, easy to react, twist and break, best believe you will be tested and now you have been warned.

when i was in high school, i wanted to become a chef, maybe because my oldest first cousin had just completed culinary school at the CIA in NYC. family, friends and food have always been very important to me, and they go together like pb&j on bread. other dream jobs i have considered pursuing have included wanting to go to Berklee in Boston for music composition, becoming a psychologist, a screen-play writer or food critic. mostly everything i wanted to purse would've been a life struggling to make ends meet, but i love the arts. "become a nurse" my mom said, "there's so many different fields to explore." "become a nurse" they said because it pays well. "become a nurse" because a life of service and taking care of other fellow homo sapiens is a life worth living. is it though?

nursing is not, i repeat, NOT for the faint of heart. forget the fact that good care is hard to come by in healthcare unless you know someone in the institution, but most nursing jobs are understaffed and require rotating shifts where a lot of the time you do not receive enough training. i know because that also happened to me. my first nursing job was at an adult rehab and nursing home which believe me was the last place i wanted to start my nursing career, but after waiting almost 9 months after passing the NCLEX, i didn't have much choice but to take what i could get. 

that first job was not a toxic one, believe it or not. i mean there were different personalities, but for the most part, that job has remained one of my better work experiences in terms of fairness. i had a great supervisor at the time who took me and the other new to practice nurse i started with under her wing and showed us the ropes. from what i remember, there was no micromanaging or exertion of power. i did a lot of things that made me feel like my nursing license was at risk, like pulling out PICC lines without imaging and i worked the grave-yard evening shift 5 days a week and almost never finished on time. 

after i graduated nursing school, my dream was of becoming a pediatric nurse at CHOP. for those of you who know, CHOP is one of the most world-renowned children's hospitals in the country. i know because i was in their ED pretty often into my early 20's because i still saw my pediatrician and i suffer from migraines. because i suffer from hormonal migraines, i would usually end up with a few debilitating migraines before my cycle which including not only severe pain in my head, but as a result of that pain i had nausea and cyclic vomiting which then caused severe dehydration. at the time i was about 100 pounds soaking wet, much thinner then i am now. with the endless vomiting that occurred and me being that skinny, it was easy to deplete all of my electrolytes which then required IV fluids, Toradol and sometimes Reglan or Zofran. i remember that while being a patient, i looked up to those nurses, thinking how smart they must have to be to have completed nursing school. when people told me to pursue nursing, i honestly didn't believe i was smart enough maybe because i am TERRIBLE at math. anyway, i did go for the one year accelerated BSN program after i completed my pre-requisites and i did graduate a couple tenths of a point shy from making honor roll. 

after applying to CHOP's career section countless times, i finally got an offer letter from them when i was still at my first rehab nursing job. the offer letter was for that of a temp nurse with no benefits, a two dollar an hour pay-cut and the potential of becoming a permanent nurse with benefits after orientation. needless to say, after 6 weeks of training to work at one of the most prestigious pediatric hospitals in the world, i finally saw things from the other side. for one, i worked on a floor that had an age range from newborn to adults. one particular shift, i remember having a newborn baby with kidney issues and a 25-yr old patient with AIDs. i remember having a meeting with my HR recruiter after my 6-week orientation was nearing an end and her telling me my performance was not up to par and that they would give me one more week of training. if they didn't think i was ready after that extra week, i would be getting laid off. so not only did i take a pay cut to work at my dream job, i also gave up my higher paying job with benefits for a temp position where the organization had much more money but didn't care to spend it on my orientation. needless to say, after losing said dream job, i was very disheartened and disappointed. i do remember the nurses there being phony. you know the kind, they're nice to your face but doubt your skills to other nurses behind your back. that kind of nonsense has gone on with every other nursing job since my dream job's dreams went up in flames. 

from bad jobs to worse, i had a supervisor once who was SO phony and psycho that she legit acted like everyone's best friend and being the gullible and trusting human i am, i fell for it after a while. behind the scenes she personally sabotaged me and had a plan to have three strikes against me to get me terminated from the hospital. i caught wind of this plan and quit on the spot before she could get the satisfaction of telling me i was sacked. i remember when we were told that she was interviewing for the manager position and i remembered her from the main hospital i worked at for 4.5 years before transferring to the smaller local hospital. i remembered that she had a reputation for job hopping and for not being wrapped too tight, if you know what i mean. i applied for the same manager position as a technicality but i told my old manager and her bosses that i thought the job deserved to go to my much more deserving coworker who was more experienced, had been at the smaller local hospital for years, knew the staff and unit like the back of her hand, AND was promised the job. that fell on deaf ears, and they hired their friend. fast forward to two years later and everything i said came to pass. their phony psycho friend only stayed for two years as the manager which i predicted when i interviewed her, and she ruined a great unit with people who felt like family and who worked well together as a team.

now two jobs after leaving my work family, i still find that the same dynamics apply no matter where i go. any time you work with predominantly females, it is like the scene in mean girls where they're running around like wild animals in the school and the kid calls his mom and says "mom, can you come get me? i'm scared." well to be perfectly honest, I'M scared of what healthcare has become. forget about patient care, you're coming into the jungle every day and you don't know which animal is going to strike first. is it going to be one, two or all of them together? i have had all of these scenarios happen throughout my nursing career so take your pick. one thing that's reassuring is that i have survived them all, but that is not always the case, which brings me to the reason i started this dissertation to begin with. sometimes workplace violence doesn't just end with layoffs from your dream job. no, it can end a hell of a lot worse for some of us than that. workplace violence can lead to a lot of things that the people creating that culture can't envision. for some people who have been the victim of workplace violence, it can lead to requiring medication and therapy for years for crippling anxiety and PTSD, for others it could be losing their work family, their sense of purpose, their livelihood and ability to pay their bills. and for others? it could cost them their life...yes, i said what the fuck i said.

there is an old saying, "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." whoever wrote that has never been the victim of workplace violence. when i did outpatient group therapy after surviving countless toxic workplaces (one of the main reasons i started therapy in the first place), i met a girl who was once a resident at Hanneman hospital for anesthesiology. after Hanneman hospital closed, her friend and her transferred to U-Penn for residency. they experienced such toxic working conditions, bullying and harassment because they were once Hanneman students, that her friend took her own life by suicide. at what point is enough truly enough?

i now work in a university hospital that is protected by a nursing union and while the union just placed a workplace violence bill, shouldn't all healthcare institutions and hospitals have laws or bills protecting the staff? i think that's where i will leave you all, with some food for thought. the next time someone recommends someone you love to go into nursing or healthcare, they should really think twice because it's hard to know what they will ultimately be sacrificing in the end. maybe we should just try being nicer to others and stop pushing people past their breaking points because you really never know what they could be dealing with in their own lives. the tyler perry movie straw, which was excellent, immediately comes to mind. 

i legitimately got told by the chief of my department in a meeting the other day that "respect is earned." i'm sorry but fuck that noise. respect should be free to everyone until their behavior dictates otherwise. it costs literally nothing to be nice, so what does one think they are gaining by being perpetually nasty? i can promise you one thing you won't gain and that's peace of mind and happiness. if someone says "good morning" to you the typical response is to say "good morning" back. you shouldn't ignore someone's greeting until there's no one left in the office to talk to and you HAVE to say hi, but rude is rude and mean girls are just that...mean. it's like they have to see what the other mean girl next to them does to see what they should do next. be your own person! if you believe in karma or an afterlife and all you put out while you existed in this life is hate and negativity, what do you really think you're going to get back in the end? i believe that we reap what we sow. i know in the bible it also says an eye for an eye, but that concept makes the whole world blind. i believe we should be the change we want to see in this world, so here i am, trying to be the change. until next time...

namaste.

-c