I wish there was more of an emotionally supportive community for nurses on Lemmy (and other healthcare professionals, but personally I'm a nurse) but until that community is built up a little more, I think we're going to have to borrow some discussion topics.
While I can't enforce it, I would like for anyone who does not work in direct care healthcare to keep their comments only as replies to a top level comment I'll make under this post.
Here's the link, but I'm also gonna copy paste both the post and my comment here for further discussion.
OG Post:
ER RN, my last shift was horrible. Triage packed, EMS lined down the hall, full house, no beds available except our trauma code/code blue room. This pt wasn’t even mine, but in the aftermath I can’t help but be angry, sad, frustrated, wanting to just quit. This day was literally an episode from The Pitt. Pt is 50ish male, came in EMS for chest pain. No rooms available so pt was put in a hallway bed, no officially assigned nurse, just charge and the trauma nurse pitching in to complete tasks like draw labs, give meds. I think labs were drawn, but no EKG done. Pt not on a cardiac monitor, just a portable cart with SpO2. All of a sudden, daughter starts screaming for help, pt is unresponsive. I rush over to find him posturing, snoring/agonal. We rush him to our code room, hook him up and cardiac says 0bpm. We run a code, he didn’t make it. MD tries to convince everyone he had a seizure that made his heart stop, but pt had no hx of it. I know what I saw, he went into sudden arrest there in the hall. His family watched him die in a hallway. I’m over working like this, ER is the only unit I’d work in, I’m not wanting to change specialties. I understand days like this happen when we are slammed. But I’m tired of this being normalized, the short staffing, lack of resources. I thought to myself “wow we really shouldn’t keep working in these conditions, we might end up killing somebody. Oh wait…too late”. I love my team, I love my MD’s, they are all amazing. But the conditions we end up working in, this shouldn’t happen. Had that been my pt, and I was the one specifically put in that situation, I probably would’ve quit on the spot. Part of me is just waiting for that day to come. Okay, rant over.
My Reply:
Quote: ER is the only unit I’d work in, I’m not wanting to change specialties. I understand days like this happen when we are slammed. But I’m tired of this being normalized, the short staffing, lack of resources.
Same, but with psych. We had a patient who was with us for months who was driving us bonkers. They were just entitled, demanding, definitely taking advantage of our inpatient psych services to handle mostly social / economic problems in an inappropriate manner. But at the same time most of us also understood that they probably didn't have easy access to a whole lot of better resources, especially not the outpatient services they really should have been using. They ODed for good about a month after leaving us and the only thing I can feel about it (either physically / chemically or from a practical / emotionally intelligent perspective) is that I'm glad that person is finally at peace. They were clearly suffering and we obviously didn't have the resources to help them but we also knew nobody else did and... It's weird because I'm not "okay" with it but I also kind of have to be because I've got 100+ more that I might still be able to help and tbh I've probably grieved as much as can be healthy under these circumstances.
These people deserve better, so much better (yours AND mine) and the fact that people keep arguing about it as a political issue... I just want to shake them while screaming in their faces. The fact that they think they have any right to tell me (or you) what these people need when they're not the one faced with either their deaths like you are or the indignities of their daily life like I am (and to a certain extent both of us with both). Especially when they know just enough to know that homeless people are assholes sometimes and think that somehow invalidates their human rights. When someone who has spent a few volunteer hours with the homeless and thinks they have a right to tell me what they need, it just fills me with rage. Almost violent rage. I had to stop speaking to my parents because of it. I was having to be drunk to speak to my parents because of this.
And in the nicest way possible I also wonder how much me being a mental health worker has helped me contextualize this better than average. Like I'm experiencing some amount of burnout and I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was also emotionally constipated (again, in the nicest way possible). I think if I didn't have as thorough of an understanding of behavioral health as I do, including addiction, I would not have been able to understand that I needed to cut my parents out and had the tools to quit drinking after doing so.
spoiler
loss