Monstrosity of the Nursing Soul
Nurses crave silence at the end of the day, a silence that to the outside world is misconstrued as angry, annoyed, aloof, but really, it’s the unspoken words of seeing what we cannot unsee in nursing.
When nurses group together at nursing stations in downtimes, it’s generally to laugh about ridiculous things patients have said, roll their eyes at the antics of families, frustrations of the job, but every so often, nurses gather and the conversation turns to the horrors of nursing, the untouched stories we hesitate to speak aloud of, the capacity and need to rebound the mind from the unspeakable, the torments we bury deep down and hope to God we never face again; the gore, the emotional and physical trauma, the tales you sometimes hear from other nurses that rip into your soul as you realize you understand implicitly the impact the monstrosity they’re describing is what your own soul has been exposed to, over and over again….the people and events that tick over in your mind long after your loved one has gone to sleep….
The sounds of disconnected ventilators startling you out of your sleep, and you run down the hall only to realize you’re in your house, there are no alarms, and your patient hasn’t extubated themselves…..the confusion you sometimes feel when your sense of proprioception has vanished, but in your mind you’re in a room full of medical equipment that won’t be silenced, your heart pounding as you realize you haven’t checked on your patient, only to realize you’re in the safety of your own home…. The unmasked face of fear imbedded in your mind, screams of agony from patients you cannot unhear, the accusations of patients s/p LE amputation; ones who logically know their leg was removed by a surgeon, but each time they see their nurse enter the room fear they will hack off their other leg, fear they have got their old leg hiding somewhere…..the demons that haunt the patients when they are alone, the whispered confessions they can only tell their nurse….the gruesome visuals of a burn victim and the arduous task of changing dressings with a level face all the while trying to comprehend how a human body could succumb to such horrific injuries and still survive…burns that you still smell in the privacy of your own thought, away from the hospital, burns that haunt you, drown out conversations, overwhelming visuals of terrified faces, exposed skin and cries of pain echoing through the corners of your mind when loved ones and friends are asking how you’re doing, at the end of the day, so you say, “fine.”
We write, we tell stories to others, of patients we know people can tolerate, we tell stories that sometimes make others laugh at the absurdity, stories that make people cry at the sadness of it all, stories designed to remind us of the hope and inspiration in nursing…but the stories that horrify us internally, the ones that have impacted us beyond reasonable articulation, the ones we can never erase from our minds or find a way to confront the PTSD of what we’ve seen and heard.
They say you can escape into entertainment, humor, pleasures of physical activities, but you cannot escape the mind, tales ingrained in you far more graphic than any halloween tale.
The next time you ask a nurse how their day was, be prepared that when they say “fine.”
.. It wasn’t fine.
It wasn’t fine, at all.
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