Short Essay
"I found the real world to be a place where the lab did as we were told with little interaction."
- Emily R.
Working in healthcare is stressful on a good day, but COVID made it unimaginably worse.
I am a Medical Laboratory Scientist. At the start of the COVID pandemic, I worked in the clinical lab at a hospital. My job is to run the tests doctors order on patients, including the new COVID tests. The pandemic forced my lab to shake up our routines, be prepared to change testing schedules on a daily and hourly basis, and even threatened our job security. Through all this, the pandemic forced me to address my coping mechanisms, make productive changes, and pursue my true passion.
"I will serve as a guide to this exploding world of technology and science so patients will be diagnosed and treated while only paying for tests they need."
- Emily R.
Of all the changes COVID brought to my hospital, my work schedule’s unpredictability was the one I felt the most. To prepare for an anticipated wave of patients, my hospital stopped performing voluntary procedures, dropping our patient census.
Fewer patients on the floor meant fewer tests to run, and my lab saw our workload virtually disappear overnight. Shifts needed to be cut to compensate. Due to my low seniority, I lost the most shifts and the ones I could get were inconsistent and at all hours. My sleep was terrible when I could get it, and I began to worry about my income. This stress demanded excessive coping, and I found myself awake at odd hours of the night, alone, worried, numbing my stress with food and television. I was overwhelmed and needed help.
Out of desperation, I started seeing a therapist.
She helped me to identify and talk through what was causing me stress so I could make positive change where I could. I learned I value my quality of life over a paycheck, so I took a job at a nearby facility with less pay but more consistent hours.
I felt like I rejoined the land of the living just by sleeping at night again. My marriage improved, my stress levels dropped, and I began to feel healthy and happy again. Who knew sleep was so important?
As I continued to work through my COVID-related stress, I discovered some stress came from feeling frustrated and helpless when I saw physicians ordering unnecessary and expensive tests on their patients.
Now, healthcare was not my first career. Since graduating college in 2012, I have worked in different areas of the biotech industry, like brewing beer and being a quality control scientist for pharmaceutical companies. I returned to school in 2017 to become a Medical Technologist because I wanted to directly help people while still practicing science.
While in school, I believed I would be involved with providing patient care through consulting on proper test selections. I helped students in other professions during student-run clinics to understand the available lab tests so they could determine the best ones to order to diagnose their patients. It was interprofessional, and I was bringing my passion for clinical laboratory science to the rest of healthcare through talking with the other students. I loved caring for patients by educating their medical providers. Unfortunately, I did not find an environment like this when I started working.
I found the real world to be a place where the lab did as we were told with little interaction. If a test was ordered, it was because the physician wanted it performed, even if it seemed expensive and inappropriate. Questioning such lab orders was not common practice, and I did not have the proper authority or support from management to pursue interprofessional discussions like I did at the student clinics. This did not work for me. I felt stuck and stressed.
This was a trickier stressor to address, but I found a way to do so by returning to school at The University of Texas Medical Branch to become a Doctor of Clinical Laboratory Science. In this new field, I will step back into an interprofessional role by serving as the physician’s laboratory consultant. The clinical laboratory field is expanding at a rapid rate, as seen by the number of COVID tests that were developed in just the past year. It is hard for anyone, even doctors, to keep up with new developments in testing technology, when to order which test, and what exactly the results mean for treatment. If too many tests are ordered, the patient is stuck with a bill for work they did not need; if too few tests are ordered, a diagnosis may be missed.
I will serve as a guide to this exploding world of technology and science so patients will be diagnosed and treated while only paying for tests they need. This fits with my original love of helping others, and the more I explore the field, the more I discover just how much this is my true passion.
We can all agree the COVID pandemic has been an arduous time, but I am filled with gratitude for it. The disruption to normal life and the struggles it brought caused me to reevaluate my stress responses, what I valued in a career, and to find the courage to make, hopefully, one last career shift. This positive change has set me up for a better life post-COVID, and I feel prepared to address the next challenges life brings. I am just hoping grad school will not be as difficult as a pandemic.
- Emily R.