Life, Nurse stuff, Work

Reminiscing… nurse schedules, summer, vacation hours…

Grateful Kae

AHHH the weather has been amazing this week. Sunny and warm…. HOT even.

I am so happy we’re getting some great weather here in May, because I had been feeling a little bummed that we’ll be away the first 2 weeks of June. Historically early June is one of the best times weather-wise in Wisconsin, and I think besides fall, it’s Wisconsin’s prettiest time, too.

walking with Ethan last night
The view from the Spine clinic elevator bay on Friday! Pretty classic Wisconsin view… corn field in the background.
My view from hot tub this morning while Charlie intently watched some squirrels running around and listened to ALL the birds.
downtown Madison on Friday night

I also have some specific fond associations with early June. Let me explain.

When the boys were little and I still worked as an inpatient transplant nurse, I worked a 75% schedule (12-hour day shifts). This meant I worked 2 days one week (24 hours), and 3 days the opposite week (36 hours), for a total of 60 hours every 2 weeks= .75 FTE. This included working every other weekend, also.

I was lucky and had a pretty sweet “set schedule” for a long time. It went:

Week 1 (my 2-day week):

  • S- off
  • M- off
  • T- off
  • W- off
  • Th- work 7am – 7:30pm
  • F- off
  • S- work 7 am- 7:30 pm

Week 2 (my 3-day week):

  • S- work 7 am- 7:30 pm
  • M- off
  • T- off
  • W- off
  • Th- work 7 am- 7:30 pm
  • F- work 7 am -7:30 pm
  • S- off

Looking at it on paper, this looks quite cushy. Look at all those days off!!! I also never worked Mondays, Tuesdays or Wednesdays!!

However, I assure you, it never felt particularly cushy.

12 hours is a loooong time. It doesn’t “sound” that much longer than 8 hours, BUT IT IS.

Especially when you’re on your feet the whole time (usually without an actual “break”, too) and dealing with very sick people and families and phone calls and doctors and procedures and wound care and medication administration and discharge planning and teaching and charting and pain issues and urgent problems and ALL THE BEEPING and machine alarms and a pager buzzing in my pocket incessantly all day long….. there was simply more to do than could even fit in those 12+ hours. I often ended the day feeling like I had been through a literal wringer.

This also meant I had to get up by 5:15/5:30, left the house at 6:15 a.m. and then didn’t get home until usually at least 8:30 p.m. (That 7:30 p.m. end time always seemed to be more of a…. “suggestion”. It was RARE to ever leave right on time. Many days I was there until after 8:00.) Plus, I had a 10-minute walk to the parking lot and an almost 30-minute commute home.

Most of the days I worked I didn’t really see the boys at all. Maybe if I got lucky I’d catch them for a few minutes before bed for a quick kiss and story if they were still up, but I always left in the morning before they were awake. I usually got home just in time to eat a (late) quick dinner, strip off my nasty scrubs and collapse into bed.

On my weekends on, I was literally not home the entire weekend. And this happened every other weekend, all year long…so it was not a rare occurrence.

This stretch (highlighted below) was always very tiring. Sometimes I’d also pick up an extra 4 hours on the Thursday if we were short staffed and stay until 11:30 p.m. (So, yes, 7 am- 11:30 pm. Why that is even legal, I am not sure.)

The Friday off always flew by in a blur and then I had the back-to-back 12s on the weekend, too. And before I cut down to a 0.75 FTE, I was 0.9, so I also worked the Wednesday! (So it went: work W/Th, off F, work S/S). Working 4 out of 5 days on 12 hour shifts, with just one day off in between (when I was alone with my toddlers all day (i.e. NO real recuperating occurred…), was really hard. And remember, this repeated every other week.

It definitely helped a lot once I could drop that Wednesday.

Overall though, I felt like this schedule was about as good as it could get for a nurse, considering the every-other-weekend requirement and 12-hour shifts. And I felt SO lucky to even have a set schedule at all! On many units you get a totally different and random schedule every week, with rotating days/ pms/ nights. A NIGHTMARE for planning purposes.

At that stage with young kids, it actually worked out better for me to work some weekend shifts, anyway. It meant fewer childcare needs, since I was always home Monday- Wednesday. (And every other Friday.)

And I really enjoyed those weekdays off!! I took the boys to the gym daycare, the zoo, the mall, the library, playdates, etc. I could run to Target with them on a quiet Tuesday morning instead of Saturday, was available for doctor appts and could clean up the house or cook dinner during nap time….

But the best part was the impact on my vacation time. We didn’t travel a ton yet back then, and I had to put my time off requests in for basically the whole year in advance. (Hated that!! So glad I don’t have to do that anymore. Was so stressful!)

With my set schedule though, if I took just two 12-hour shifts off (on my Thursday and Friday), I could get a ten day stretch off!! (See below)

It was amazing.

I always scheduled one of these blocks in early June, but I’d keep the boys in daycare on the Thursday and Friday. The weather was usually great, and I’d have this nice long 10 day stretch off with NO travel plans. I’d use the time to buy my summer flowers, go for a run, get ready for summer, do some household organizing, etc. It was fabulous.

I also typically took a stretch off in October (because= favorite season), and another one in early December for holiday season prep.

This is maybe the one thing I truly miss about my inpatient schedule!

Now, I work a typical Monday-Friday schedule, 1.0 FTE. Yes, I get a lot of vacation hours, but we also travel a lot more now (and take long trips….), so I tend to use those hours.

I don’t have much time left to take off and just stay home. Although, thinking about all of this, maybe I should re-think that a little! Eh, it’s a tough call!! It’s hard now since if I want a week off, I have to take a full 40 hours of vacation.

Anyway, all this to say, this early summer season always reminds me of that yearly early June “staycation” that I’d always take. I miss it!!!

Do you ever take longer “staycations” from work where you’re off for an extended time but don’t go anywhere? Anyone else reading ever work 12 hour shifts?

Daily Gratitude:

I am grateful for some nice 1:1 time with Ethan yesterday. Ivan and Asher were gone for soccer, so Ethan and I made a Dairy Queen run in the afternoon and sat outside. We also went on a long evening walk together with Charlie.

20 thoughts on “Reminiscing… nurse schedules, summer, vacation hours…”

  1. I used to work 12 hour shifts – 2 days 2 nights then 5 days off when I worked inpatient surgery. Now I’m Monday to Friday 0715-1515 and I hate only having weekends off. It’s too busy and impossible to make certain appointments. I love taking 2 weeks off in the summer to stay home – I do yard work, catch up with friends/family, a d take local day trips. It’s the only time I ever want to have a staycation. Sitting at home in the rain or cold with no plans has never appealed to me. I also get a decent amount of vacation (38 days) but it still doesn’t always stretch enough for all the trips I want to take!

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    1. Yes, the appointment thing alone seems impossible!! Thankfully my current Monday-Friday job is WFH and pretty flexible overall, but I can’t imagine how it would work if I were strictly in a clinic/other inpatient role M-F business hours. I feel like between the kids and myself and doctors, dentists, eye doctor, etc.. it’s so much! And I only have two kids, lol!

      2 weeks off in the summer sounds amazing. I really do miss that! I can still recall how excited I would feel at the end of my Sunday night shift when I knew I had one of my 10 day stretches off ahead of me! haha.

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  2. The first thing I noticed when I looked at your schedule was, those back-to-back weekend days!!! That would be HARD. And when you pointed out that you also always worked Thursdays, yes I can see how those Fridays off would just fly by. Overall I can see how your schedule now fits your life much better- the boys are older, they have all sorts of weekend activities that you wouldn’t want to miss. But that annual 10 day vacation June must have been amazing.

    To answer your question, no I’ve never worked 12 hour shifts. And yes, I can see why it would be much, MUCH harder than eight hours!

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    1. The other issue with that schedule was since I was literally gone ALL DAY on my work days, this meant that EVERYTHING else in my life had to fit into those other days. Errands, housework, groceries, exercise, fun stuff, etc… there was really no combining life/work on my work days at all.

      I feel like it would be super hard- impossible, really- for me to still be working that schedule now. The boys have so many things on the weekends and we are often going in different directions. I can’t imagine how we’d manage if I were totally MIA on 1/2 of all weekends anymore! I anticipated that becoming an issue and fortunately found this M-F job when the boys were still in early elementary years.

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  3. I have never worked 12 hour shifts but my sister is a nurse and she did and she hated how you were never done at the end of those 12 hours – there was always an extra hour of work it seemed. But she was done with shift work by the time they had kids and was working in a role that is very similar to yours I think. She was glad to have a more set, traditional schedule during her pregnancy but then she opted not to return to work and does some PRN work for the transplant clinic.

    I technically have unlimited vacation time but it is so hard to take time off in my role. It’s getting easier now that my new hire is very capable of covering for me for the most part. I take a shouldless day/quarter but have a hard time taking more than one day off unless we are going to my parents or on a trip because I know the work is going to accumulate while I am away. I guess that is another pro for nursing shift work – every day is a new day so you aren’t catching up on things while you are gone. We do not travel that much right now because we are not big ‘travel with young kids’ people. We will go to my parents for a week in August but I probably won’t fully disconnect from work that week because again I do not want to come back to a total gong show when I come back the following week. I do have a coworker that totally disconnects and doesn’t worry about what is going on but she’s not as client facing as me and is kind of checked out at work so it’s easier for her to do that.

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    1. I can totally see how your “unlimited vacation” is very deceiving!! It does seem like your role is NOT one where you can just easily take off. That sounds so hard! I am lucky in that for the most part, there are people who can cover my duties- or things can generally just wait. Not always, but mostly. It is also true that that was one perk with inpatient nursing- it really is usually a “new day” every shift. I mean, sometimes we’d get the same patient for days or weeks on end, but it’s not like you can bring work home with you!

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  4. Don’t feel bad about missing the peak weather in Wisconsin – you’ll have even better weather in Hawaii and that’s when I’ll enjoy the good WI weather for you since that’s when I’ll be there. I’m really excited to go back.

    I can see the advantages of your inpatient work schedule but YIKES!!! You always had to be “on” for long periods both at work and at home. OTOH the 8 hours a day/5 days a week is no picnic either. Back in the bad ol’ office days I had a few bosses who took issue with me leaving work at 5 – you know, the stated end of the work day. The same bosses who told me how impressed they were at the way I stayed on top of my work load and always took on extra work…at least with WFH I can take breaks when I get my work done instead of having to look “busy” all the time.

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    1. I actually kind of prefer in some ways though the whole “totally on” thing in one place or another… when the boys were younger whenever I worked just an 8 hour shift I would sometimes find it challenging to transition my brain from work to home. Or I’d just feel kind of exhausted/ checked out after working all day and didn’t feel like I was really giving my best self at home. In some ways I found it easier to just be all in on work for the whole day, and have basically zero home responsibilities, and then on the opposite days, be all in on the home duties. I had a co-worker though who felt very differently though and chose to stick with 8 hour shifts because she didn’t want to have SO much of just one thing in her day. She preferred some work, some home and didn’t like the imbalance of the long long days on either side..

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  5. I did my medical training in the days of the 80 work week with 27-hour overnight shifts. When I was inpatient I would work a q4 schedule which means you work a 27 hour shift every 4 days then have the rest of the next day off. To be clear this was a HUGE improvement over the schedule the residents a generation before me worked. However a q4 schedule means you have one weekend where you work a 27 hour shift on Thursday and finish midday Fri and have Sat and Sun off, but you also have a weekend where you are on call Friday into Sat, one where you are on call Sat unto Sun and one where you are on call Sun into Mon. That means you work at least a little 3/4 weekends. We had little kids then I think it was really hard on my husband to solo parent so many weekends. I CANNOT imagine living like that now!

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    1. Those super long resident shifts blow my mind. I still don’t understand really why it was done that way?! It seems like such an obvious thing that it just wasn’t even healthy or a good way to provide safe medical care. That call schedule sounds so hard! I mean, I guess the best time to have a set up like that is when kids are really little and oftentimes their “weekends” aren’t necessarily that different from the weekdays. But still- it doesn’t sound fun. And it would definitely be impossible with older kids in sports, activities, etc on the weekends.

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  6. I have an embarrassment of riches and have too much annual leave. I’m in the Uk so much more generous allocations. My collaborators were giving me grief about it, but they are a bit younger and childless, and could just go somewhere nice, while I struggle to fill the time? And my job is pretty flexible, so if I need to go do a kid or volunteer thing for a couple of hours midday, I don’t need to take it.

    My husband has a pretty strict annual leave policy – he has to take all of it – and accrues flexi time if he works over 37 hours, so he often takes off for the random school closure days, but someone does his job when he’s not there, no one does mine.

    I’m kind of stuffed this year (resets 1 august) but I’m going to make a clearer plan for next year. My husband has 8 days visiting Canada with his dad, We normally do camps in the October holiday, but maybe T and I will go somewhere. We’ve got home exchange credits so could go bum around Stockholm or something for only flights. And we are taking a longer stint at my parents for Christmas, 17 days when we normally take about 10. We realised we’d come back early, but the weather is so rubbish in January in Scotland, that we’d get cabin fever.

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    1. That’s so interesting how different the policies are! I always used to say when I had my old schedule that it seemed like the “key” to making everything work was having at least one parent with a really flexible and/or work from home schedule. I was often so confused how parents were supposed to get to those in-the-school- day activities, or the 4 pm soccer practice, etc. Around here, it’s pretty rare to see live in childcare or even fulltime nannies, really. Like I can’t really think of many times I saw nannies dropping kids off at activities- it was usually one of the parents, no matter what time! Always confused me how people made that work who didn’t have all the days off like I had. (I suppose on the other hand, maybe the parents that had the very inflexible M-F jobs simply didn’t sign their kids up for those things, so maybe it just “seemed” like everyone was able to be there…) There have been so many times I think how grateful I am to WFH now and am not sure how we would have managed certain things over the years if I had still been working my hospital shifts.

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  7. So interesting how nurses work. I didn’t know. When you were on shifts? Who took care of the boys? I can’t imagine that schedule can work for other working moms for long term. How do they manage if they are still inpatient nurses? I don’t take vacation days when I will be spending time at home as I could just work a bit and rest. I have worked 12+ hrs but very rarely. Can’t sustain at that intensity.

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    1. When I worked 12 hour shifts Thursday/Friday, they went to daycare during the day and Ivan dealt with drop-offs/ pick-ups (and sometimes we had babysitters filling in evening gaps as needed bc Ivan used to work weirder hours, too…). On the weekends they were home with Ivan and/or babysitters as needed, or sometimes my mom would come and stay for the weekend if Ivan had other things going on too to help out.

      Most of the nurses have their kids in daycare or maybe some with family watching them, and then their husbands just really have to step up and cover the weekends/ evenings! I know some of the men really dreaded when their wives had to work all weekend because they were FULLY solo with the kids all weekends then from sun up to sun down. 😉

      Also some of the nurses with young kids will opt to work the night shift instead of days (7 pm- 7:30 a.m.), so they can work all night, go home, sleep while kids are at school/ daycare, and then be with the kids in the after school hours from ~3-6:30 before heading to work again at 7 pm.

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  8. Time off work by myself is currently at the top of my wish list so this very much resonates with me. It is difficult to fit in everything (family trips, adventures, activities, etc.) so prioritizing solo days hasn’t happened as much as I wanted but still working on it. I did one in April which was day date with my husband and one in May which included packing for camping weekend but a stretch of time sounds glorious to me!!

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    1. It’s so much harder to make my vacation days stretch now that I work M-F! And I get plenty of vacation days! But there’s just no comparison to when I could combine a couple vacation days with other days off and create those long stretches. Now it’s like, EVERY day I want off has to be a full vacation day and my longest natural “stretch” is just…. the weekend. Lol. I find one single day off really is not enough for me to feel rejuvenated. haha. It just goes too fast. I feel like I need at least a Thursday/Friday + weekend or something to really feel like I got a good break!

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  9. I have never been as stressed out about time off as I am right now. There’s so much going on and while I have not been on a true vacation since 2019, taking off random half-days here and there for things and various family commitments out of town means that I am struggling. I have a ton of sick time, but not personal/vacation time. *sigh*

    This is the first time in my married life I’ve had a full-time M-F job and it is definitely taking its toll on our house. I used to devote an entire day to cleaning and organizing and I just don’t have that time anymore and right now our dining room table is filled with reminders of things I need to get done (REI coupons to use, makeup I need to reorder, bills that need to get paid, Hannah medications that need to be reordered), the Sunday laundry is still hanging up, needing to be put away and/or ironed, the floors haven’t been swept in weeks, and I don’t want to talk about dusting. There certainly are pros to this job, but I don’t think my husband realized exactly how much housework I was doing before.

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  10. We work twelve hour days when we are in the theatre – usually 10:00am – 11:30pm. It is exhausting, but a day like that only happens four or five times a year for me, hopefully. (In theatre – as opposed to opera where I work – they have these days during tech called “10 out of 12s” which is you work a 12 hour day, with two one hour meal breaks in there, so you are only working 10 hours. It’s always been kind of the industry standard for theatre, but there is a movement to do away with them because they are so exhausting.) Some times we do have three rehearsal sessions in a day and then we are at work from 10:00am – 10:30pm. These three session days used to be really common, but we are trying to limit those kinds of days – our work contract used to have us work at 10 hour day before we hit overtime, which is also industry standard, but at my company we have negotiated 9 hours a day before overtime. I do work a lot of evenings, though, which often means I have mornings off. I love having time when the kids are at school and I don’t have to be at work – that’s when I run and write and read and take care of life things. I also have long stretches of time between jobs – sometimes up to three weeks- but then I’m unemployed, so I’m not making any money. While it does feel luxurious to have that time, it isn’t the best things financially. And also it limits when i can take vacations to when I haven’t booked myself for a job.

    I don’t know how people with full time jobs get life admin done. When i’m working, I can never find time for doctor appointments, and camp registration and oil changes and all that!

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  11. Up until Covid hit in 2020, I had never taken a “staycation”… all my annual leave was used for trips (usually back home), but in 2020 when nobody was allowed to travel, I had to use up some AL before the end of the year and stayed home for a week. It was glorious.

    I have not worked 12-hour shifts, but you might know that I work a 10-hour schedule and yes, those days are long. Even two hours more than a regular 8-hour day is long, but I do get most Fridays off and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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  12. Former bedside nurse, as you know. My schedule in Seattle was the BEST. I hated rotating shifts and preferred nights. I worked – with my roommate – every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 12 hour shifts. Then off M-Th. It. Was. AWESOME. We took mini-trips M-Weds and usually were at home Thursday to get ourselves situated for the weekend (grocery shopping, cleaning, etc.). Or, we did that Monday (because, tired) and then left Tues-Thurs. I loved it. LOVED it. This may be why I loved Seattle so much, LOL.

    So I get you. Totally totally get you. Now, I work all the time and while I’m technically “off” in the summer, we both know that I am not (nor are any other TT Faculty, anywhere…). I don’t take much time off when I supposedly can, and that’s on me. I’m trying to be better! I admire your commitment to travel and vacation. Use it up – it won’t do you any good sitting there! 🙂

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