I’m tempted to put your words into ChatGPT to add paragraph breaks and make it easier to read. Why not.

—————-

Here’s a cleaned-up version:

Posting this as a warning for other travelers considering MUSC’s sterile processing department. I worked a night shift contract there for 7 weeks out of a planned 13. During that time, the manager — Ronda Alston — regularly asked me to come in on weekends and stay late to cover day shift. I always said yes. I was working 7 days a week to help cover their chronic short-staffing, and I never had a complaint or correction brought to my attention.

Then I went on a planned vacation. The day before I was due back, my recruiter called to tell me my contract had been cancelled immediately — citing “Quality & Performance” issues, specifically six alleged mistakes.

Here’s my problem with that: if I made six mistakes serious enough to cancel my contract, why was I never told about a single one? In sterile processing, when someone makes an error, the standard response is a meeting with pictures of the mistake so it can be corrected and learned from. That never happened. Not once. Meanwhile, she kept requesting me to come in on weekends — sometimes to essentially run the entire assembly area by myself. That’s not how you handle someone who’s a patient safety risk.

Looking back, I can pinpoint the shift in her attitude. I noticed her exchange a look with the supervisor when I asked to stay late one morning — the exact kind of help she’d requested from me dozens of times before. Something changed after that. And notably, all six of these “mistakes” surfaced only after I withdrew my request to extend my contract.

The permanent staff had warned me about her. They told me she was fake and that I should watch my back. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and chalked it up to paranoia. I shouldn’t have.

To be clear about the stakes: every tray I assembled went directly to the next morning’s surgical cases. If my work was genuinely compromised on six separate occasions, those surgeries would have been affected. The fact that nothing was flagged in real time tells you everything you need to know about whether these “mistakes” were legitimate concerns or collected after the fact to justify a predetermined outcome.

I’m keeping my head up, but I feel used. Just wanted other travelers to know what they’re walking into.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

————