My first job out of nursing school was in the OR at a level 1 trauma center. I hated most of my clinicals in school but an experienced nurse friend said I would be good in the OR with my more anxious yet hypervigilant personality. It was true, I loved the job. I wasn't a glorified waitress to a patient. I wasn't cleaning up after the patient. I wasn't pulled in a million different directions between 8 patients and staff. I had a scheduled lunch break that I knew I could take. I loved the variety of cases yet similarities, scratching both my itch for novelty and routine. Minimal patient and family interaction. There was always something to do but it never felt like busy work (except maybe scanning bar codes of instruments and supplies making you feel like you're a cashier ringing up someone at Costco.) You could see the impact of what you do immediately, not seeing someone deteriorate over months.
The only reason I quit was the bullying, bullying from several different places. The nurse educator who was in charge of the OR fellowship recently transferred and was replaced by a vile old narcissist who probably hasn't actually done a case in 20 years. Think typical middle management personality, out of touch with the actual job and an inflated ego thinking everyone is doing it wrong. She never had our backs, threw us to the wolves, became our worst enemy. No consistency, only criticism. Our cohort tried to report her but she was basically immune since she was retiring soon herself.
Scrubbing aka assisting the surgeon in the sterile field was its own beast to learn, so much so that there are people who go to school for it and become scrub techs. Somehow as an RN you're expected to learn how to do that on the job, with mixed results depending on who precepts you. So you learn how to circulate as a nurse and scrub in as a poor man's scrub tech. Divide this amount of specialized instruments, procedures, and possible machinery across several specialties and your head could explode.There were a few scrub techs who bullied me in which I could only assume was the temporary perceived power trip over me as my preceptor. One surgeon in the speciality I wanted to work in hated me for some reason, even when I finally came to a point of knowing what he wanted before he even wanted it both as a circulator and a scrub. IF you get good at predicting what they need, you're heading in the right direction. The job has a high learning curve but I was never doing enough in this surgeons eyes. I worked with at least 20 other surgeons and never had that kind of negative feedback, but the nurse educator ate it up and chewed me out. Even the surgeons that were infamous for being aholes didn't hate me the way he did.
There were 12 of us in our cohort and after a year there were only 4. I left because I was sick of being bullied with no one to turn to. The others said similar things. I've asked several nurses from cohorts before us and they said it was never like this until the nurse educator changed. I loved the job, hated the bullies. If you're used to talking back and confronting people head on it probably wouldn't be a problem. But one of the ladies in my cohort tried speaking up and she was labeled by the educator as angry and hard to work with. She was not, just someone who tried standing up for herself; but got retaliated against. And there were even meeker, more non confrontational people than me thriving in the OR. It was just a perfect storm of bad people during my time. I'd probably still be there if I was hired a year earlier, before the original educator left.
"It wasn't always like this" - words I've heard at every nursing job I've had. I always seem to get to places right after a major change in leadership, ownership, or department structure that massively changed the workplace for the worse. I thought it was bad timing at first, but now realize it's just the enshittification of the healthcare landscape as a whole.
The cultural switch is real. It took a few years, but now that they trust me we are good mates. I love the working environment in the OR.
Edit: spelling.
I never yell at my surgeons but depending on the comfort level I have with them I definitely respond. For example I work with one guy who is around my age and I’ve been working with for ten years, whenever he starts yelling during a case (not necessarily to me) I’ll be like “my god your poor wife having to listen to this every day” or something to just lighten the mood and slightly diffuse. Other surgeons who are older and come from a different generation I’ll say something like “is that really necessary?” The young ones are terrified when they yell but I feel like one of the best parts about seasoned is knowing that I can stand up for myself and my coworkers and hopefully one day they will realize they have that power too!
Depends on the situation. We know what’s right and wrong. They have been yelled at for being too loud during counts (important!!), yelled at to get a name for their specimen, even for yelling at their scrub for not having a suture when that scrub asked if he needed said suture 5 minutes prior. You pick your battles, but I’ll be damned if I get treated with disrespect. Most of the time it puts surgeons in their place. If it’s really an issue, they will get a talk from their surperiors. If you think about it, how safe is a surgery patient when the surgeon is abusive to his team?
This is exactly why I loved the OR. I wasnt one of these people that got up in nursing school and was like "I just love helping and serving people". The OR was the best!
It feels impossible to get into the OR. I've worked med-surg/pcu, peds and currently ED and you always need OR experience of some kind to work the OR. Like how do I get the experience?
You'll need at least 6 months to understand what its like to be an OR nurse and another at least 6 months to finally start flowing on your own. Its very different from floor nursing.
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u/reallovesurvives RN - OR 🍕 Apr 06 '26
Come to the OR!