Nursing...we knew and we didn't

And we knew......but we didn't know.

You hear the warnings. 

'Nurses eat their young'. 

'You are only idealistic because you are new'. 

'You'll get over that soon enough'

And as a nursing student, you wonder why.  You have helped a sick one.  You have help bring a new life in the world.  You held a hand or a heart as someone left this world. And you know that you will never be like 'that'. 

You learn a lot more during your first year of nursing and things become a little more clear.  You helped the sick ones 5 at a time.  Having to prioritize who if any will get to dip from what you thought was an endless well of compassion.  Time, compassion, and hospital goals, fatigue, and acuities mix well from time to time.....but not often enough. 

You start the day with high hopes and sometimes you leave triumphant knowing that even Florence Nightingale would have been proud of you on that day.  But more often....you leave tired, achy to the bone, unsure and scared that you didn't do enough.  Or maybe you missed a detail.  You agonize that you might have spent more hours on charting then you did with patients. You fear the doctor's wrath when you 'inconvenience' them with a detail you thought important but was deemed trivial.  You absorb a patient's or a family's fury when things don't go as well as they wanted to go.  You hurt for them when you cannot make it right or take a wound, physiological or emotional, and make it all better. 

You apologize to your family, because after school, everything was supposed to get better.  You would have more time and emotion to give. 

You might choose to put on a face for the world or you get angry because you knew this was what you always wanted to do but ideals are not equivalent to hospital policies or reality.  No one has seen what you have seen.  You cannot talk to anyone about it.  You have to pretend you can slip easily back into a 'real world' when you leave the hospital, all the while know, what you left behind was as real as it gets.  

HIPPA denies you closure when you gave your all to a patient emotionally and physically....and then cannot ask what became of them or learn a new lesson about the course of a disease or injury.

You are told that you are not going to make it if you don't grow the tough skin, learn to work and get your sleep while trying to balance family, your life, and emotion. 

That prioritizing can sometimes mean that you cannot hold a hand as long as you would like to hold it. It is not a choice between the chicken or the fish.  Sometime it is a choice between life or death....and you may not even realize it.  Sometimes it is a choice between preserving dignity or saving a life.  And these choices and decisions are expensive.....emotionally.

 The hospital is more concerned with your warm body with the RN, LPN, or CNA behind it, how many patients you can take before you break down physically, loudly protest, or just burn out. Only to be asked....but 'where is your commitment to patients, your co-workers, or this hospital.  It is a cruel carrot stick game.  But you better be on your guard not to fall for it because fatigue will eventually win, your body eventually gives up, and God forbid a mistake can be made and the hospital will say you should have used your judgment and not come in.  And you want to remark, well, you should not have called and begged me to pull that 5^th 12 hour shift in a row during my daughter's graduation/birthday/wedding.  The one I told you I was looking forward to so please don't call me. 

You get told that you should watch what you eat, drink, and how you sleep.  Take care of your health.  Be physically fit.  Have a neat appearance after you have been vomited, pooed, coughed, or bled upon.  And you ponder this after your fourth 12 hour shift, with no lunch, no break, feet throbbing as you drink your double caffeine coffee or energy drink eating donuts, sweets, or candy from what I refer to as the trough which is a bowl in which sugary, small, portable snacks are dumped into for snacking between patients so that your blood sugar doesn't bottom out....just stay unhealthy and labile. 

You live with the fear....of making a mistake.  Any mistake.  Any misstep.

And then you check yourself.  Your fears, your patients, your family, your emotions, your commitment, your drive....what will it take to balance it out?

Sometimes things will have to give.  And you lose one.  A husband.  A boyfriend. A family.  Your commitment.  Your drive.  Becoming a nurse is like a long, difficult, painful, and taxing natural birth.

And we knew.....but we didn't know.....and we still fight to be the nurses we want to be

And you pray....please, please, please God....don't let me give in.  And you realize how it is that you may become....'like that'.