I am a huge fan of my next guest. CJ is a former Nurse turned Audiologist turned Ear Wax Remover. As an Audiologist, CJ found herself lonely on the job, frustrated, and miserable with all the driving she had to do. She felt her clients didn’t see the value in what she had to offer, nor did they appreciate her. When she realized her normally happy-go-lucky side was missing, she knew she had to change.
That’s right. CJ removes ear wax for a living, and she loves it!
CJ created her own career change– twice! Although she is not a dentist, she has always worked in health care. Her story shares certain principles that are universal in any health care field. CJ is from the UK and when she found herself no longer the happy person she really was inside, she knew she had to change.
Here’s how it all started…
CJ: I gained my State Registered Nurse (SRN) qualification after 3 years of study in the National Health System (NHS.) I’d fallen in love with operating theatre work (that’s the operating room for us Americans.) I was born for it. I loved everything about it– the intensity, the skill, the banter with the surgeons, the camaraderie with colleagues, the moaning about those in charge, the learning. Every day was different. Every day was exciting.
I worked my way up to a Sister’s post and did it for 20 odd years. I was good at it too. I think when you really love what you’re doing you can’t help but be good at it. Nurses loved being in my theatre and some of the surgeons would ask for me to help them out. I adored Orthopaedics and was lucky enough to work on cutting-edge stuff. Being scrubbed up for hours at a time didn’t bother me, it was so fascinating.
My personal life through those years lurched from crisis to more crisis. I was quite rubbish at having a ‘normal’ life, but when I walked into the Op Theatres, I was happy as a pig in poo!
During that time, CJ fell in love with a man who moved up north to be with his family. After helping her mother through her bout with cancer, she eventually moved up to join Phil in the north. That was when she discovered there were no positions in the OR.
I couldn’t get a job in an Operating Theatre, as all posts in the NHS were frozen as money was so tight. Instead I joined a locum agency and got work in care homes. I was well out of my comfort zone, but did my best for the patients who were mostly elderly, lonely, and needy. But I wasn’t happy. I then found an opportunity to become an audiologist in the private sector.
I can’t tell you how many times over the next 8 years I regretted taking that job.
The audiology training was intense. To be an audiologist in the NHS it takes 3 years, and we did the same amount of study and practice in only 6 months. It was all day in school, then back to the hostel to have dinner and study until midnight, sleep, go to school the next day, and be tested on what you’d learned. Even weekends at home we spent all day and most of the evening studying because every Monday we had a full day exam. If you failed you were out. It took £75,000 to train you, and they were not willing to spend on anyone not putting in the necessary work.
Towards the end of the 6 months I was having nightmares, not sleeping properly most nights, and I didn’t go home anymore in order to maximize studying time. But the bonds our class made with each other carried me through. We’d lost over half the people who’d started out with us, and it felt like we were in a war sometimes!
Our teachers told us not to expect to pass the final exam the first time. Of the 110 people taking the exam, only 19 had passed. I thought I’d failed, but I was wrong. I got through.
How was the work once you finished school?
I worked for that company for over a year, as part of the deal to get trained for free. I was put with an experienced audiologist to be my on the job trainer. He was nice but used me to do his service work more than helped me learn to sell hearing aids. As a Field Dispenser, I had all my equipment in the car and visited people in their homes. It involved lots of driving and lots of lugging heavy equipment in and out of the car.
Selling hearing aids is not the easiest of things to do in the UK. For a start, we have the NHS who gives them away to people for free! However, the NHS doesn’t provide the higher technology or discreet aids that the private sector does, and people mostly don’t like what they’re given. But that’s the mindset of new clients when you go to see them, and they are horrified at the price of them. They don’t understand overheads. My easiest clients were always the ones who had NHS aids that they kept in a drawer and never wore.
No more camaraderie in this line of work, it’s a lonely life. I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed colleagues and camaraderie in my working life until I didn’t have them.
We can relate. Patients have a similar lack of understanding of costs and overhead in dentistry. What happened next?
Then the guy who had recruited me way back at that initial meeting started his own company, and I went to work for him. In the last couple of years of working for him, I was also doing a lot of long distance traveling. They didn’t have a dispenser in Cumbria, and I was the nearest one, 3 hours away. It wasn’t too bad in the spring and summer, as it’s a beautiful mountainous region. Photography is a passion of mine, so I could stop and take shots of the incredible scenery. But that wore thin quickly. Every day started with a 3-hour drive to see a client for 2 hours, another hour drive each to 2 more clients, and when I finished at 5:00, another 3-hour drive home.
Fragglerocking’s Photo of bridges in Newcastle
On top of that, there was the stress of not reaching your sales targets in a month and the stress of your commission being eaten up by petrol and costs accrued to the company. Some months I paid more out than I earned.
I don’t think I was very good at selling. I got fed up with client stupidity, as in, “Yes I can afford one… No way am I going to wear one… The chaps in the pub would take the micky.” All sorts of stupid excuses I just couldn’t get my head around. If you can’t see, you wear glasses/contact lenses. If you lose your teeth you get implants/plates. But I often heard, “I can’t hear, but I’m not wearing a hearing aid because it makes me look old”. Arghhhh!!!
Even the clients I sold to were not always happy. They wanted to hear as if they were 18 again, but hearing aids don’t make you the bionic man/woman. They are an aid, not a cure. When people have spent a couple of thousand pounds on aids, they want a miracle not a better than before. And I got fed up with spending my life with old people. Sorry, I’m an old person, I know. But they were all much older than me, and you know how they say working with kids keeps you young?
Well the same is true in reverse.
It sounds a lot like dentures. They will never be as good as your real teeth. The challenge is in communicating that to patients. What was your catalyst to change?
I’d started a blog a few years prior when I really got into photography. I wanted to put my stuff out there like a diary for my family and myself. About the time I’d realized how much I hated my job, how miserable I was making mine and Phil’s life (yes, he’d noticed,) I came across a post in another blog by an ex-dentist. She wrote about how she’d felt the same and how she’d gotten out of it. That post stuck with me, and on my long drives across to the West I’d think about it and wish I could do the same.
Fragglerocking’s Photo taken in Belgium
But how could I?
I was 56 by then, too old to start over and I needed to work. Phil could just about manage the house and bills on his salary, but we needed mine to have the niceties of life. But the more I thought about it and the more I read Laura’s blog, the more I knew I had to find a way to make things better.
I sat down and discussed going part-time with Phil, and he said I had to try anything that would make me the happy person I used to be. So I went on to 3 days a week. It didn’t work. 3 days a week being miserable is not much better than 5 days being miserable. I used to suffer terribly from Sunday night insomnia. The dread of Monday every week was too much– my heart rate would increase, I’d toss and turn, get up for a cuppa, and eventually nod off 2 hours before the alarm went off.
Eventually, Phil and I had another long chat, and since I was barely making any money anyway, we decided I’d jump off the cliff and resign, and then start looking for shop work or sweeping the streets or… or… anything but this!
Even if I had been making a mint this would still have had to happen. It destroys your soul spending 12 hours a day being unhappy, trying to hide that (and failing). That last 3 months were the longest 3 months of my life, but when I came home after my last day I was dancing through the front door. I felt 2 tonnes lighter, and I’m still grinning like an idiot remembering it now.
How were you able to find your next gig so quickly?
I didn’t have to find another job at all. It came to me. A colleague and friend, Brenda, knew how unhappy I was and had often offered to hire me in her practice. When she found out I’d given up all together she was all fired up to have me come and work for her.
“I can’t,” I told her. “I hate everything to do with hearing aids, and I don’t want to sell them ever again.”
“No problem,” she said. “I’ll send you on an earwax removal course, and you can come and work for me doing that.”
So now I work 2 ½ days a week, earn more a month than I ever did before, and perform earwax removal on anything up to 12 people a day. I love it. My clients come in deaf asking me to speak up, and 15 minutes later they’re calling me an angel and hugging me and telling me to stop shouting.
This is amazing! You get to help people in a way that makes you happy too. I know my husband couldn’t hear for months, and his ear would get clogged every time he swam. He finally went to the doctor, and was so excited he immediately sent me a yucky photo of the giant ear wax ball they had removed. It was life changing for him!
How is life now?
Brenda sells hearing aids, and she is great at it. She looks after her clients, and they love her for it. They send Brenda chocolates, flowers, take her to lunch and think she’s god’s gift to the hard of hearing. Our Facebook reviews are awesome. Lynn is our office manager and she keeps us in line as both Brenda and I are a bit scatty in different ways. The place would go bust without her.
We laugh and moan and look after each other, and I am, once more, sleeping well on a Sunday night and as happy as a pig in poo.
I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t read Laura’s blog post. Maybe it would have all happened anyway, or maybe it would have happened in a different way, though I can’t imagine how. But it was that post that kick-started the change in me, sustained me whilst I figured it out, and gave me the courage to DO something about my own misery.
It was very scary to just stop work without another job to go to. “Well you had a husband to bail you out,” I can hear you think. I’ve always earned my own money, always been independent, and I knew Phil was worried about the burden of both of us for any extended length of time. But he trusted me to find a way to earn, and he gave me the space to do that. My Mum, long gone now, used to tell me that as one door closes, another one opens. That’s been my mantra throughout life, because she was so right. I’m living proof. Laura’s post reminded me that, and I’m the one that had to set that in motion.
Leave a Reply
What do you think?