Moving Into the Future

For the past couple of weeks, I have been transitioning from full time employment at one hospital to part time employment at another. There were physicals, credentialing, fingerprints, and background checks. What do you know, my new employer tells me that I had a positive quantiferon test. What this means is I have been exposed to Tuberculosis at some point since I was onboarded at my last job in 2023, and I now my body is manufacturing antibodies.

That’s pretty common in workers in emergency medicine, thanks largely to our homeless shitbag population. Contrary to what you have been told, being homeless isn’t something that happens to people through bad luck. No, the people who are homeless have a substance abuse problem, a mental health problem, or both. The person who just falls on hard luck is rare, and those who are homeless from bad luck rarely stay there for long. When I was homeless, it was caused by my ex-wife taking everything in the divorce, and I was homeless for less than a month. I think it was two weeks or so.

Anyhow, my old employer says that I could have been exposed to TB anywhere and I can’t prove otherwise, so they aren’t doing crap about it. This means that I will have to get a chest x-ray every year for the rest of my life, to make sure I don’t actually have TB. I’m gonna be like Doc Holiday.

After all of that was done, I had to begin my orientation and onboarding. It turns out that I know some of the instructors and a couple of the managers. The rest of the onboarding class was wondering how I seemed to know so many people.

Now I have to precept for a couple of weeks so they can finish training me on the new hospital’s policies and procedures. Then I drop down to working 4-6 days per month. Easing into retirement, as it were. I’m waiting to see if my old employer tries to screw me out of the PTO that I had banked (110 hours worth, so about 3 weeks’ pay).