I fervently believe that all jobs are hard, nobody really has it “easy;” we all get sick of our jobs. I speak on this point at an abnormal level for somebody my age. Whatever stress your career puts on you, it’s within human nature to minimize it to tolerability and then to despise it. This was one of the first facts I picked up when starting my fledgling career. A confirmation of one of my favorite truisms, “Everybody’s shit stinks.”
That said, I reserve a qualification for at least nurses. Maybe theirs smells a smidgen more.
As any partner should, I try to be there for her. If she chose a different profession, I have no doubt that I’d be fielding complaints about TPS reports, accounting errors, terrible students, whatever. I listen to her frustrations and her encouragements just as she does for me.
It is a rare week that I don’t hear about a situation that is heart-wrenchingly sad or simply inspirational.
It’s more than common for a person you worked with for weeks to just up and die on you in one 12-hour shift. A patient can go from laughing at 8:30pm to a belligerent silence at 6:00am. The hours between are whirlwinds of exhausted bodies, fierce hunger pains, and an utter and total lack of self. You’re now part of an elite team of experts working for one impossibly noble goal. Hunger, bodily fluids, emotions, all other concerns… they all fade.
Only to be snapped back to reality when you find yourself gingerly wiping the blood and sweat off your patients pale blue lips during postmortem care, just as your patient’s family sombers in for first of. . . so many last goodbyes. As you walk out of your patient’s room, it’s difficult to reconcile the sounds of gleeful morning birds chirping outside the window with the wet distilled chaos that still threatens to drip down your face. But, it’s time to stomach a Nutrigain bar, and maybe a barely warm, yet still burnt cup of coffee. One point five hours to go.
After work, she will arrive with timid smile, with only a hint of the slightest shake in her voice. It’s taken me years, but I can usually detect it. I’ve become her emotional Spectrogram. But I won’t know she had performed CPR in a cold lonely room on a woman she had considered “the sweetest little thing” just a few hours before. Not until she tells me. If she tells me.