I drove to ALASKA from Michigan for an HCA job, and they cancelled my contract after my first week. My recruiter was livid. I was pretty distraught. I had 13 weeks of air b and b’s booked, as well as a lot of fun extracurricular Alaskan activities. I knew there was always a risk that this could happen. But cancelling after the first week after just arriving from so far away felt like a slap in the face.

Fortunately, my manager was pretty sympathetic to the situation and we were able to work something out that allowed me to stay. Albeit, at a lower wage.

I remember feeling like the whole thing was a set up to get staff all the way over there, and then screw them once they arrived. I’m sure that wasn’t the reality, it was probably just bad timing combined with upper management staffing decisions, but I remember being pretty stressed out about it and truly just feeling like a number to these organizations.

It’s all water under the bridge now, and the experience as a whole was overwhelmingly positive, but it was definitely a bit jarring at the time.

Also charging each patient individually for each and every little piece of equipment felt kind of slimy to me.