Hard Day at the Office

Someone posted, “If you work in healthcare, one day your significant other will ask you how your day was. You'll think of the horrible things you've seen, the things you've had to do to keep people alive, and the horrible things people have said to you. But you'll tell them "it was good".” 

Yesterday, I had to call the mother of a young woman in ED and tell her that we couldn't get her daughter back. Then I had to call her best friend and tell her that her best friend had passed away. Then I went to the bedside, held her warm lifeless hand, and whispered into her ear all the things I promised I would relay from her loved ones. Then I put the sheet back over her head and waited to hear from the coroner.

Ya, how was your day?

Because of where I work, the odds of this happening every shift is pretty high. And like most things in life, it gets easier every time it happens. Some days are harder than others, some days I have good news and some days I have bad news.          

Some days I witness conversations between doctors and patients about a new terminal illness, an explanation of a discovered diagnosis, or I’m in the room as the doctor asks a patient if they want us to start compressions and stick a breathing tube down their throat if their heart stops beating. What makes it even harder, is you might walk into the next room and they transforming their fear and loss of control into anger, and direct it toward something irrational and most of the time it's toward you. It’s a roller coaster of a day and you never know how it will go.

People don’t go to the hospital because they’re doing well, they go to the hospital because they’re sick. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that even if we discharge the patients, we don’t get to see the happy ending. They have a long road to recovery and my time with them is a quick stop on their journey. To be honest, I didn’t realize how heavy working at the bedside would feel. I was so excited by all of the skills I was learning and the procedures I was exposed to, that it didn’t hit me until later in my career just how mentally taxing a job in healthcare can be. 

Now, if you're reading this and you're a new grad, or thinking about getting into healthcare, it's not always like this. I have had SO MUCH laughter at the bedside and wonderful experiences and connections with patients. But I want to be as real as possible when I say, it's not a 50/50 split of happy vs hard scenarios. But boy does it make you appreciate those happy days. 

If I could bestow any advice upon you, it would be this, learn how to process your emotions and your experiences at the bedside in a healthy way. You’re going to be faced with heavy situations and difficult conversations throughout your career, so you need to learn how to make sense of and process these experiences in a way that allows you to let go of them. Hold them, reflect on them, be grateful for the opportunity to learn, and then release them.  Prepare yourself, so it doesn’t blindside you . Don’t push it down or suppress your reactions because it only hurts you and your practice. 

Learn to make peace with what seems like chaos. Realize that the only thing you have control over is you and how you process and learn from what’s coming at you. Take that growth and use it to be a better person and a better nurse. 

So today I held the hand of a patient who had passed away, and fulfilled the wishes of their loved ones who couldn’t be there in the last moments. It was an honor to do so.