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From there I was invited to work for a hospice in Georgia, a new branch, near Statesboro. I left the prison job, and I worked in the hospice. I was living, again, month-to-month, this time at an RV camp. The hospice was filled with emotional drama, which I had gotten un-used to; and the hospice struggled to survive. The leadership hovered over us with threats that "We're watching you" ~ it was truly a sad place, and a sad way to treat professionals. Everyone felt the pressure of the lack of patients and funds, like riding a horse, but wondering when it might collapse, and you under it. So, within ten months, I moved from full-time to part-time, to when needed. I had only fourteen patients. I was working only about ten hours weekly. Even though the only chaplain, I never had more than about that number, and the entire census was little more. I could see another border crossing in the near future, life was moving on, I with it.
Again, I began looking for work. And, wow! was offered by far the best paying job I had ever had, back in Florida. I wanted this to be my last job, a place to work until retirement. After two years of working long hours from before light to into the dark, up to six days weekly, and increasing pressures, partly due to the hospice being sued for misappropriation of funds, increasing longer hours, reduction of staff, and a continued problem with repeated harassment from a staff member, I left. I was jobless, again. As to the harassment, or the abuse, after repeated complaints over many months, and in which I avoided contact with this person, even bypassing going to the site on the way and from visiting patients, I was called into the office of the manager, the one who had assisted me prior to move my work station to get away from working next to the chaplain and had herself spoken of how she did not like the "other side" of the person. Now, she informed me the harassment would get better, just be patient, she informed me (so, after all these months, I was being told, essentially, "We condone abuse in the workplace, though we make it clear we don't." And, oddly, this was another chaplain.). I agreed to the patience, but, would have better said, "No, your own policy says this hospice does not condone this kind of treatment from staff. And I will not condone it." Suing the hospice entered my mind later, but I have no interest in such. I prefer to trust I will be taken care of, and move on in obedience to the Divine and rests in knowing I acted in integrity. I am okay, as long as I can go to rest at night, and am in peace about the life I am living.
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