Vet here, so USAF if that counts, and VA semi-regularly for joint and back physical therapy.
AF was a cluster fuck.
VA is consistently the best healthcare I receive, which seems to surprise most people I tell that to. I guess they used to be pretty shit, but made a ton of improvements in the last decade or so. …just stay away from those sketchy-ass elevators. Riding those fucking things is probably way more dangerous than anything I ever did in the military.
4N1 - surgical tech. We’re medics who work exclusively in the OR and aren’t really medics. Fuckiness was 100% due to staffing. My last year I was doing three people’s jobs… Typical day was 530a to anywhere from 7p to 11p.
Crunched the numbers against my pay and it came out to like $4 /hr lol.
Got the fuck out, now I’m a civilian surgical tech. First 8 hour shift after separating felt so weird. Like, it’s time to go home? At 4p? Dafuq do I do with all this time??
Joke’s on me - now I’m in nursing school ontop of working full time, so free time is gone again. Feels good actually working toward a goal though, vs grinding every night fantasizing about the best way to kill myself (that was my cue to go ahead and turn down a reenlistment lol).
A buddy of mine went from active army to AF reserve and felt the same way the first time he got released from a drill weekend while the sun was still up
It sucks that jobs like that are so horribly undermanned. My guess is people who do med stuff don’t even think of military as an option
Keep working at it and I hope you get some good payoff from it sounds like you deserve it!
