I'm a nurse. I work in long term care taking care of people with dementia. All of us have stories of some genuinely awful shit we've been exposed to at work. Today as I'm moving someone's stuff out of a room they have south park playing on the TV. She's clearly not watching it, but if I change the channel she'll be upset. For some weird reason it seems like they're just playing a bunch of the transphobic episodes in a row as I come and go from the room though so I'm stuck having to listen to terrible "jokes."

I have no recourse for any of this, I'm just supposed to deal with it. I have some control over the common area TVs so at least there's that going for me, easy enough to make an argument that the news is not good for people with dementia with the discussions of violence and thus it doesn't play almost ever. On other units, most people stay in their room and watch OAN or Fox all day.

On the other hand I'm still stuck having to put up with bigoted grannies that have zero filter because that part of their brain doesn't work anymore. The mantra everyone has on the unit is "oh they don't know any better." In some ways, I have the best assignment in that regard, the other units don't specialize in dementia and have people that are just as shitty but don't have as convenient of an excuse.

I hate that I just have to accept being misgendered, at one point when I tried to correct someone they just went "well then what are you?" Honestly the dementia ladies are usually pretty nice. When I worked in a hospital I got so much more shit from people that 100% knew better but were being intentionally bigoted, still ended up being labeled as someone that complained too much and they used that against me.

Then there's just the standard gamut of things that if you spend a bit of time on /r/nursing you'll see repeated over and over, shitty staffing, out of touch administration, shit job quality. We lost our COVID pay recently and conveniently right before another wave hit, so instead of a paltry extra 3/hr for doing direct COVID contact, we don't get paid extra for it but we still lock the unit down for 10 days from the most recent positive swab.

I think what terrifies me the most is that I have another 20-25 years of this and it's only going to get worse.