the one percent sure beats ya down.
Writing by intrinsic on Thursday, 16 of July , 2009 at 18:09
it’s been a long month already. i have to admit- it’s been pretty good so far. i have been spending a lot of time with friends and family. chris and i just got back from a little two day trip down to the salinas pueblo monuments near mountainair, NM.
i think what’s made it so long is work. not that things have been bad at work, to the contrary- i consistently love my job. what’s making it so difficult is coming to the realization that to be a nurse is to often have to deal with grief. not just a family’s grief, but one’s own. it’s one’s own grief about a patient’s death or about a patient’s illness/injury that wear on a nurse. it’s normal to be sad or feel awful if someone you know dies or encounters a tragic illness or injury. and health care co-workers know what it feels like to grieve for a patient or a patient’s family. it’s just that no one else understands. and certainly not the patient or family- who can often be quite horrible in stressful, tragic situations. and what is a nurse expected to do despite the sadness and occasional battery from patients and families? keep a stiff upper lip, so to speak, and maintain a professional distance. not to say that it’s not okay to empathize with a family and maybe shed a few tears- but we’re still expected to pick ourselves up immediately, head next door and take care of THAT patient when all we can think of is the incredible sadness in our hearts.
why hadn’t i noticed this weird reality of nursing before? i don’t know… a particularly horrible code at the beginning of this month really opened my eyes to it though. a random, terrible death; a family treating the rest of us like crap for 6 hours; the patient’s children- who just didn’t understand. it was then that i realized that to be a nurse means that no one that is NOT a nurse can possibly understand what it feels like to lose a patient. even in the ER when we meet patients the instant we initiate treatment, i grieve for those patients of mine who code and die. i grieve for the families who lose a loved one, often unexpectedly. and i think about what i would do if it were someone i loved. i carry those people in my heart for a time after, often thinking about them. and with this last code, i think about them still- 2 weeks out.
one aspect of my career is that nurses are privileged enough to spend those last few moments with a person before they die. afterwards, we make a profound difference in how the family responds and remember their loved ones. so don’t think that i’m “woe is me”-ing myself right now- i am so honored to be part of every part of the life cycle. what i have been struggling with is how heavily these deaths weigh upon me. and how people who don’t work in the health care field really don’t understand it. that means my own family and friends and other patients or the families of patients we lose. we give so much to everyone on a daily basis to just get it thrown right back in our faces because it wasn’t good enough, fast enough or what they wanted. i walk into patient rooms after just coding a child, for instance, only to get yelled at because they’ve been waiting for a gajillion hours for treatment for something they could have easily seen urgent care, their doctor or a stupid pharmacy for. and when you say “i’m sorry, we just had a child die on the unit”- they still don’t care. or, in the case of the aforementioned family of the awful code for example, we bend over backwards to accommodate dozens of people only to get yelled at because we split the family up. or, we thoroughly check out people who aren’t injured only to be accused of “just trying to cover [our] asses”. or, a family member asks us “how long weren’t you doing CPR on [my family member]?” as if we weren’t doing our jobs correctly or to the fullest of our ability in a futile situation. how can someone grieve under those circumstances? or function? or try to care for other people? all at the same time? as a behavioral health nurse told me after the incident above, during a “debriefing”: “people are mean. and stressful situations seem to make them meaner.” that shouldn’t be “okay”. but how do you reprimand someone who has just lost a loved one?
and do i want to continue having to cope with these situations? it’s a difficult trade off at best. a career i love 99% of the time can be so awful 1% of the time- but that small percent floats around my head for weeks after the event. and no one gets it. sometimes it makes me feel all elite. my work friends and i- part of this super secret club where we suffer together in silence, except when we get into the break room. but when i try talking to christopher, for example, he feels bad- but ultimately i know, doesn’t really get it. that part it sucks. the people you most want to understand just can’t. which is fine, i guess- but it makes one feel lonely sometimes. i think this is why health care people form such a tight bond amongst each other- because we get it. we’re the only ones really. we understand the constant pressure of never making a mistake, of having to remain professional when all you want to do is scream or punch someone in the face and of losing patients and feeling horrible about it as if you lost someone closer. but i suppose at the end of the day, when a family member looks you in the eye and says “thank you for trying to save our son. i know you did everything you could”, it’s worth it, even if no one really understands it.
i guess i solved my own dilemma.
but no wonder so many nurses drink.
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