I love love love this person's remarks on working as a nurse in the Emergency Department. It so perfectly describes how I feel as well. I am not one who is typically great with putting my feelings and thoughts into words. There are other who are great at it, such as this author. I feel like it doesn't discount the relevance and I found myself nodding and agreeing with many of the things pointed out.
*Jennifer and I on my last shift working at BBMC*
Don't look at ER staff as cold, insensitive, and mean since patients and family have NO idea that they aren't the only ones who are human.
Seriously, wth is wrong with me tonight?
When people learn I work in the Emergency Department they usually ask, “How do you do it”? or say “Wow, I bet you see a lot of crazy things”. My answer aloud: “It’s never dull”. My answer in my head: “You have no idea”.
What profession do you walk out of a room that someone has just yelled, “I’m gonna kill you &%$#” and laugh? Do you perform CPR, call a time of death, then talk about your weekend plans all in the same breath? It gets worse. You don’t want to know.
Even the bad ones: a rape or child abuse. Even that has to be walked away from and on to the next stomach ache, cold/cold or even heart attack. It may, for a minute, leave a pit in your stomach the weight of bowling ball. But even then, you can usually get rid of it with a sigh so deep that it goes all the way down to your toes. Sometimes it takes two sighs.
Sometimes I give a high five to someone on my team. Not to say “congrats”, but to feel a little human touch and know I’m not alone.
If a tear even feels like it might try to work its way up from your throat, you swallow it quick. It does no one any good to let it out. The family can’t see it. Your co-workers can’t see it. We all get one turn to break down and then everyone else has to be strong. We can’t all walk around like sobbing messes. When I see another on my team tear up (dead children do it the most to us), I know this time, it can’t be my turn.
So we suck it up. We learn to turn “it” off. To well, in fact. What choice do we have? We cope. We walk into fatal car accidents with our first questions (mentally, at least) being…”were they drinking, were they high, they probably weren’t wearing their seat belts”. Something, ANYTHING, to separate us from this. Something, ANYTHING so we can sleep at night and try to convince ourselves that we are not so temporary. That our spouses and our children are not so temporary.
When we can’t find reasons, we have no choice but to swallow that lump. We come home, we hugs our kids, and we cope. By the time we wake up for our next shift, it’s almost gone.
Each time I had to do that, and I suspect I’m not alone, I lost a little something. I shut off that pathway: “sadness, remorse, fear” too many times. That now those feelings are hard to come by at all.
But I’m not alone. And it’s the people by my side that make me feel normal about this chaos that we live in. This peephole into reality, that only a few of us see. We, more than anyone understand the temporariness of it all. The unfairness of it all. That even children aren’t safe from this awful game of life that no matter what ALWAYS ends in death. What choice do we have? This our job. This is our life. Even if we quit it, it’s too late. Once you peep through that hole, you can’t pretend you haven’t seen it.
If you don’t live in our world then that last sentence is greepy, maybe…morbid? Depressing? In our world, it is fact. It is life. It is truth. We have no veil of ignorance when it comes to our own mortality. Much to the dismay of our family and friends we sometimes come off as “cold” and (I hate this one)…”insensitive”.
So we may cry a little less. But here is the upside: we also laugh a lot more. We love fully. We live without regret. We generally don’t waste time on negativity or pessimism. We understand fully “one life” and we aren’t about to waste it. We wear our seat belts and don’t drink and drive. We live smart, but never in moderation! We are the ones laughing the loudest! We don’t shelter our kids, because even children without trampolines are sometimes “temporary”. So we let them jump and we let them laugh, we just have a net! We don’t keep them home from the park because we are worried about the “Boogy man” because we know most of the time it’s “Creepy Uncle Ralph” that is doing naughty things to the babies anyway.
If I did this job alone, the isolation would be maddening. But, I’m not. My co-workers are my sanity. My family: my rock. Together we get through this life with our eyes wide open. I wouldn’t change my world for anything.
*Miss Christy and I*
{I still miss my Baywood peeps}
