I am a proud nurse, i love my job, i love everything that comes with it, everything.
But just to make something clear here, i don't care about your sexuality, identity, ethnicity, skin color, how you look or the lies some people tell us, no, i don't care, i am a nurse, i want to help you get through whatever you get through and help overcome it.
BUT, i do care about the way you handle me, i care about the tone you talk to me, about the way you talk to me and about the things you think, you are entitled to call me. Disrespecting me, abusing me, cussing at me or treated me like i am your slave, not saying thank you or excuse me but talking to me like i am trash... and then telling me i am racist or homophobic, just because i am telling you to treat me with respect just like i am treating you, is that too much to ask?
I get beat by patients on a daily basis, i get called a bitch more than once, sonce covid, people are getting impatient with us and the doctors, but although we are just trying to help you, you think you can treat us that way? Write an complain and lie we abused you? When you were the one hitting us? Throwing a cup of glas at us? Threatening us with a scalpel you stole from one of the drawers? Spitting at us? And even more?
Yes, people do that, people treat us, the first responders, the one you clapped at although we needed support, the ones who are there when one of your relatives died and hold their hand because the covid rules in hospital didn't allow any visitors no matter what.
On a daily basis i am shocked about the way people treat me, how cruel some can be, how bad they behave, acting like we don't want to help.
And us, the nurses, doctors, first responders, try our best, disregarding our privat life to work overtime because we don't have enough personal, getting paid the minimum wage, being under such high stress all the time that three of my coworkers miscarriaged without knowing they were pregnant, we want to help you, but we have to treat everyone the same and look after those who are in the worst conditions. Yes everything is possible nowadays regarding your health, but no one understands or wants to understand, that cutting your finger is not as bad as having to reanimate a heartattack. And getting in my way to help someone because you are impatient with our care, although you see we have only 2 doctors, 5 nurses and 55 patients to take care of in an Emergency room with only 10 rooms to spare, then i don't believe that there is really good in people.
I try to hang on to those who are lovely and nice and praise us because of our work, i really do, but there is more bad than good.
And those who are really sick, are often those who are the most quiet, the ones who scream the most, walk in with their two functioning legs and demand help because they feel an itch.
I love my job as a nurse, but not the people, but they are part of it. They caused me to believe there is a lot of bad in this world and some are horrible enough to let it out on those who just want to help.
As every human, nurses have feelings too. Often patients and their relatives and even sometimes your colleagues forget this simple thing, people having emotions and feelings as well and being effected by it.
Working in a hospital often brings a lot of emotions with you, how you handle them is another story.
I can’t count on my two hands how often I was abused mentally and physically by patients, relatives and colleagues. In a hospital there are a lot of feelings flying around, a hospital is not a happy place, not even the baby ward is.
You see a lot of things happening and a lot of shit going on which is very heavy for a human mind. I mean, when I started the nurse life, I was 18 years old, and the work of a nurse is often portrayed differently than it actually is.
You are the one nearest at the patient, they get a diagnosis, you are there, they scream at you because they are not satisfied with your ‘service’, how they call it these days, you will be there or they need someone by their side, you are there. You as a nurse will always be there, you get bombarded with so much stuff everyday that it often gets difficult not taking them home with you.
At work, you have to be professional, nothing is allowed to come your way, mistakes are not allowed and you always have to remind yourself, those are human beings you are working with. But with the time working in a hospital and getting bombarded from every side with complains and bad feelings, you get a kind of numbness in your heart and there are only the rarest cases that can make you feel emotions again.
For example, when a relative comes to you and screams at you, wants to show you how in-compliant you are in taking care of people and are even writing a complain, of course we get angry, of course we want to scream back and tell them how hard it is to take care of 36 patients, while not having enough nurses to take care of them, and how hard you are trying to get by to make everyone satisfied, but you are not allowed. You have to stand there, trying to be calm although a storm is raging inside you, and smile and nod at them trying to make them as happy as possible.
The same goes for patients, when you are not walking fast enough for them to get them something, or when you are not doing what they want you to do, they are mean and unfriendly and you have to smile and nod. They don’t care what other things, mostly more important things than to get them a cup of coffee, you have to handle. They want you to serve them and often they think, being in a hospital means, a always smiling person will do as they say. When we don’t do as they say, there are nothing but complains and often even a written complain about us.
And when those complains come in by our boss, we get in even more trouble because our bosses don’t like to see complains and they are not interested in our side of the story. The Patient is the king.
Just as all the bad feelings flying around, the death that is always beside you, the sicknesses you witness, the sadness and the hopelessness. Seeing an old person being all alone, not one person there or left being and still being the friendliest human being in the entire ward, beside someone having everything but being unsatisfied with it, just breaks my heart. As well as people who want to be sick and try every trick to make you take care of them, like driving them in a wheelchair to the toilet although they can walk pretty fine, while the really sick ones, who can’t even breath or walk without support, trying to crawl to the toilet and refuse every little help just to have that little independence, is something that angers me so much. It is an unfairness growing inside and you don’t know where to unload them besides on your colleagues or taking them home and unloading them on your loved ones, what is wrong as well.
I think at this point it is very understandable that at some point, to not get eaten alive by all this, and those are only the small superficial things i mentioned, there is at some point a building numbness. You can’t stop this numbness, it will grow out of self protection.
When I was younger, I was crying a lot, when I saw my first dead patient or my first reanimation, or hearing someone having a bad diagnosis or losing a dear family member, of course it moved me, it always does to this day. But you can’t take all of this with you when you go out of work, because in the end, we always tell ourselves, this is just our job, and nothing else.
But is it really just our job? Often, when I had emotions I couldn’t handle, I talked to my colleagues about it. They are the ones understanding you the most, telling my family, they don’t understand. But even colleagues often are so way past the numbness that they don’t care, they don’t care anymore about the people, about the complains and the lifes that are passing by. They are doing their job like robots and often are seen as unfriendly and cold. But here as well, they are humans, having people they love as well and seeing and hearing what is happening every day, they don’t want to think about their loved ones in this kind of position.
The nurse life is really different than you expect, we don’t walk around looking perfect makeup and with open hair, there is no McDreamy or a hot male nurse you can eat up in a restroom, when those kind of rooms even exist I never saw one of those. We work until we sweat, more often than once did I cry at work and was hold by my colleagues and more often than once were they the cause of my tears.
Not only the patients and relatives are unsatisfied and let all their emotions out on you, just like very other human being, working with each other is difficult as well. Often there is bullying and complains about other nurses and when one has a bad day and you stand in the way, you are the one getting hit by all of this. Way too often we are angry, and there is always a lot of anger these days about everything, and when this anger gets out it’s like an explosion, the nerves are already very thin and then the colleague is letting all her frustration out on you. The Argument is not far away.
Sometimes it is good to let all those emotions out, but sometimes certain emotions should just stay where they are, because in the end, it is your job.
Would have someone told me back in the days, how emotional and stressful this kind of job is for my body and mind, I wouldn’t have learned it again. I have seen so many horrible things a lot of people my age can’t even imagine and they let me see the world in a different way, I don’t like at all.
It showed me, that having emotions and trying to work with these emotions is terrible for one human and that life in itself is horrible. I lost more than once faith in people and the human kind in general, only on small occasions do I believe in the good nature of people.
Working a shift in a hospital comes with lots of emotions like thankfulness, helplessness, confusion, happiness, sadness and the strongest of them all, anger. Lots of anger.
In my time as a nurse, I started from being happy to getting angrier and angrier at everyone around me. It became so hard to handle, to be unsatisfied and angry and just being desperate for some kind of hope, that this is not everything there is, that I myself became numb and emotionless.
Hearing someone died, I just shrugged my shoulders or made jokes about it, someone had a bad diagnosis, I handled it with black or dry humour or even said that bad people always get what they deserve. Someone, like a patient or relative, was unfriendly to me, I began to not care and answered them back, not unpolite or with curse words, but in a manner that I myself always hated being talked to. But at some point, you can’t handle it anymore, you treat the people how they treat you, you try to do your job, everyone is taken care, of but nothing more than that. You are in such a self protection state that the only thing you care about are your emotions and how to survive them. Realizing you becoming a robot yourself is hard and you know that something has to change or you will lose a bit of your humanity as well.
I always told my patients, that they should have just said something nice to me and i would have done everything for them. Having to scold a 77 years old patient about being polite and friendly makes myself embarrassed, because in what kind of world do we live, where I have to tell an over 50 years older person to be polite to someone?
Is it now understandable that a very simple ‘Thank you’ is making my day and a little crack in the wall around my heart? Because it is really as rare as you think it is and often it makes me more smiley and happy than any money in the world.
This simple sentence tells you, that all the effort and all the work you handle everyday, that makes you so numb and empty that you can’t do anything but sleep at home out of exhaustion, was worth the stress and the tired work you have to deal with.
And of course all the feelings you as a normal human being, even as a nurse, still have.
So never forget, nurses are people too, they do what they can and they try to come by in a world, that don’t see the necessity of medical stuff and the importance being the health system.
Every nurse you see in your life, no matter the mood they are in, learned this job to help and take care of people but handling these people made them who they are. They are just protecting themselves from more damage to come. Therefore, no matter how grumpy they look, they are just trying to get by in a world that doesn’t care enough about them and mistreat them every day they step foot in a hospital.
Let’s tell them, that they are worth it and that they are important, especially in times of a crisis where people seek their help. We nurses are the ones keeping everything steady, just imagine us being not there anymore. I tell you one thing, the doctors won’t help you on the toilet or feeding you when you can’t do it by yourself. Just think about it and you see the importance behind the smallest things we do that keep you alive.
Being a nurse, you have to be human and you need feelings. Otherwise you are not the right person for the job, because no one else will ever put his life on the line for you, and ignore their own well being, more willingly than nurses.
When working in a hospital, there is always the balance between life and death. To this day, there are more babies born than people dying in a hospital, what somehow gives hope. Because when you work in a specific division in a hospital, you mostly see the death, the babies are born somewhere else.
So death is the shadow following you.
There were a lot of patients who died while I worked, some unexpected and some expected. The ways they die is different as well, some need a long time to let go others let go very fast, some die painful and some peaceful. But until this stage of passing away is reached, there are a lot of other stages. Some we witness in our daily hospital life and others we don’t.
I will take one patient as a example. Mr Becker, he was a 55 years old man, he liked to go fishing with friends on his free weekends, drinking beer and smoking, otherwise he worked in a fabric, what exactly I can’t remember. He had no family, no wife or kids there for him, only his good friends who visited him a least every day of the week.
How I meet Mr Becker? He came into the hospital because of a huge abscess on his throat. It was as big as my fist, but before he came to the pneumology, my division, he entered the ENT. They examined the abscess, took xrays and more. Apparently what they found on the xrays was a shadow in the area of the lungs and they called our head of department of doctor for a case conference.
Our head of department said, that he will take over the case when they handled the abscess. The ENT did and Mr Becker found himself a day later in our infirmary, they gave us instructions on how to properly treat the abscess wound and from then on, we started the diagnostics.
That meant, Mr Becker got a bronchoscopy with biopsy of lung tissue, then more xrays, MRI, CTs and microbiological tests.
When the tests came back, it was clear, that Mr Becker had lung cancer and the abscess was the result of a exploded metastasis in his lymph node on his throat. When he first received the news about his cancer, he was positive about it because the doctors told him, they will immediately look into it about chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
But in truth, they were only buying themselves and Mr Becker some time. Because knowing that he already has metastasis in his lymph nodes only means, there will be even more found. So they made more specific xrays, MRIs and CTs and even sonographies to search for more metastasis.
When we were talking about the patients when new shifts came and we gave over the protocols, it was more than once mentioned how much we pitied this patient. He was still young for the normal human age, he was active, could take care of himself, had a job and a good life.
But since knowing his cancer disease, he wanted to fight it, but with every new diagnosis he lost hope. After all, they found brain, kidney, stomach and even more lymph node metastasis. And I will never forget how I met him on an afternoon near the exit of the hospital, he was out smoking because of his nerves, were I greeted him and asked him if everything was alright. He just looked at me and said, that they found liver metastasis as well. He looked so discouraged and heartbroken.
I mean, how good can someone handle a diagnosis knowing he is certainly going to die? No one can. He was in the beginning positive, until the doctor again talked to him about the therapy ways. And they told him, that there won’t be a cure for him, that they won’t be able to heal him and that the therapies they can do with him will be palliative.
From the on our palliative division began taking care of him as well, they visited him while he was with us and talked to him a lot. Only days later, he began his palliative radiotherapy, he was always on clock and always had a smile on his face while taking his palliative chemotherapy.
He began losing his hair and he began losing weight. But still, he was friendly and stayed so long with us, he knew our names and talked to us. Those talks were sometimes happy and sometimes sad. When it was announced that he was allowed to go home and continue his therapy from there, I had a long talk with him where he cried a lot. He told me how scared and frustrated he was, that he would love to scream at us and violate things around him because he found it so unfair. Unfair that life was going to end whereas he wanted to do so much more than he did until now. He told me, that in the beginning he hoped life would give him a second chance, but in the end let him down, although he never did something bad. he always tried to be friendly, he always tried his best and often forgot to put himself first, why he probably was still alone without a family who could look after him. His parents were dead and he only had his friends and he couldn’t burden them like that. Letting them arrange where he will be buried and giving them the money for the funeral already broke their hearts.
He more and more isolated himself while staying with us, his friends didn’t come as often anymore and on the day he left us, he only nodded in our direction and I remember what he said to me while he cried. That his biggest wish was to give us the blame for his disease, to curse us to death and to scream at us, but we, the medical team, weren’t at fault at all. We just have the bad luck in being the ones to tell him and we are the ones suffering the behavior, but he could never blame us. Then he told me, that in the weeks he stayed with us, he felt like at home and he could never be mean to such lovely and friendly nurses who already have to endure the bad behavior of far less sick people than him.
A whole month went by and then one day we got a call. Mr Becker was back, he was down in the emergency and pleaded the nurses and doctors down there to come back to our infirmary. Why he pleaded? Because he didn’t belong in our division anymore, he should have gone to the oncology but he wanted to come to us.
When we went down to get him, he was laying in a bed, and unrecognizable. he was pale like a ghost, so unhealthy thin and he had no hair at all. He was not the man I knew a month ago. The cancer and therapies took every last life out of his body and showed us only the shell of a man. But he still could give us a weak smile and started joking with us again. If we had missed him, and he just wanted to be with his lovely nurses he so much loves.
We, of course, started joking with him as well and showed him that we appreciated his humor.
From then on, he was in the stages of passing away. He got an only room and the palliative division again came to look after him. They recommended a lot of medication to make his passing more bearable, because he had a lot of pain and fear. The fear was the worst, he often cried and told us how scared he was of dying alone, he didn’t want to die alone. He was always happy when someone was with him in his only room, when we came to check up on him.
At the beginning he was able to talk, at some point he wasn’t, he could only look and smile at us. Then he couldn’t open his eyes anymore. He became morphine in a perfusion continuously and oxygen, both against the shortness of breath he had. He became psychotropics against his panic attacks and the fear.
And at some point he was just lying there, he wasn’t reacting at all anymore, he wasn’t eating or drinking anymore. It was clear from the beginning that he came to us to die, out of fear of dying alone in his home.
We continued to take care of him and talking to him, even when he couldn’t respond. We told him to let go and told him it was fine. He did good and his journey was over now. And I could even now imagine how he would smile and joke at that sentence with us, but it’s something we had to tell him. He always said he didn’t know what his purpose was and why all this happened, and of course we couldn’t give him an answer.
After a week of coming back to us, he died. I wasn’t there that morning my colleagues found him, I was only told that he apparently just stopped breathing and was gone.
Mr Becker was a friendly and good man, remembering him was one of the most emotional cases we had in a long time because we witnessed everything, from beginning to end. We don’t often have such cases, because like I said everyone dies in another way. I really liked that man, he was funny and reasonable, he was a realist and open with his emotions.
I just hope he found his peace with everything and could also let go in peace, with no remorse or bad feelings following wherever he went.
I started crying a bit while writing this, I can’t describe every detail of that case because it would be too long then, but I hope I could bring it over properly. I will tell more of those stories some time, but this was the most emotional one I could remember and am gonna tell about. As always the names were changed.
When you have a lot of patients, you soon realize, that not every human on earth is very smart. I wouldn’t call some patients dumb, but sometimes, you look at them and just think... What?
On those days the doctor in charge and myself are going on our rounds to talk with the patients. Sometimes it’s very funny what you get to hear and see.
For example, a lot of patients google their diseases or illnesses and often try to explain to us, what they have. So it happened that an older man told us, his pneumonias origin lays in the bacteria of his freshly cut gras he mowed on the weekend. That’s why he is sick. Although the doctor tried to explain that the gras and its bacteria is not the cause, but maybe the older age and excessiv smoking he does, he disagreed. He said it’s the bacteria and we gave up after some point.
More over, the patients lose every bit of shame as soon as they walk into the hospital. So it happens a lot, that patients take off their clothes and other stuff to show us what is wrong with a certain body part. But often that certain body part doesn’t have anything to do with what’s wrong, and they just want to stand naked there. For example, there was a woman I had to inject her daily insulin, and we often go for the stomache area to inject. But instead to just pull her shirt up, she completley exposed herself in front of me and showed me everything he had on her upper body. For me, being a longtime nurse, it’s nothing unusual to see someone naked, but even I often get shoked of how willingly patients show you their privat parts or body areas. Or when we went on our rounds with the doctor, the patient wanted to show something on his leg, but the pants weren’t going all the way up. Well, the pants had to go and the underwear too. We clearly saw his junk, and he wanted to show us something on his knee. When we wanted to tell him, he didn’t need to undress his underwear too, he just laughed and said, that like that he can air his junk. Ok.
But about the not existing shame some have, I will talk about another time.
What’s very annoying as well is, that patients often don’t tell the nurses what is going on. The nurses are the first ones in a patient room in the morning, we check the vitals and talk to them. But there are a lot of them who don’t tell us their problems and only tell the doctor. So when we are on our rounds, it’s like when a brick hits you because often, the doctor looks at you and asks you if you know something about it or have done something about it, and when you, as the nurse, say ‘No, I didn’t know that’ it feels a bit stupid.
But about the trust and the behaviour the patients often have for nurses and doctors, I will talk about it as well another time.
Another thing that often happens is the incompliance some older patients, but younger one as well, have. We try to always explain patients what is going on and what we do etc. But sometimes, they just don’t get it, and that incompliance is very often found. So we try to explain and explain it again, and later the patient asks the nurse again what we already tried to explain, just to ask another nurses again what we before tried to explain.
But again, that’s another story for me to tell on another day.
Those three categories are often found when doing your rounds or an a daily basis when handling patients. There is even more that happens what I didn’t mention, but for me, it all goes in other categories I will talk about. Sometimes it’s very funny to listen to patients or to look at them while they do something, but sometimes it’s not.
It was another afternoon shift for me that day, from 1pm till 10pm, when I arrived in the usual hectic and chaotic atmosphere called my colleagues. They are always trying their best with the limited time they have for the huge workload they carry.
In this shift, my colleague was this time Anna, her second day as a fully learned nurse. She is a sweet girl, very innocent and nervous, but tries to cover it up with talking big. I’m okay with that as long as she does her work.
When our colleagues from the dayshift handed over the protocols and told us about the patients, the informations we need to know for a shift, my one colleague Jenny pointed out one patient more than the others. It was Mrs Muller, she had a bronchoscopy earlier that day and Jenny told me, that the patient didn’t look good. She told the doctor, a young and unsure one, but he just waved her off.
So when my shift started, Anna and I tried to come by with the workload, when Mrs Muller was brought back from a xray. She laid in her bed because she didn’t feel good enough to walk. And when I looked at her, I as well thought, something is not right and the feeling I had in my guts was giving me a red signal. Mrs Muller was very pale and she had cold sweat on her forehead, she had trouble breathing and was telling me how unwell she was.
I brought her back in her room, she had a single room, and told Anna to get everything to check her vitals. Now, Mrs Muller told me, she had to go to the toilet, very urgently and she made clear, she had to take a dumb(I have no idea how to tell that subtle). So I tried to help her out of bed, sitting on the edge of the bed was semi okay and trying to stand up didn’t work at all.
Side note here, Mrs Muller was a young patient, like in her 50s and she could take care very good of herself. So my alarm clocks were ringing again.
And from this moment on, it all went down.
Anna was checking the vitals, and they were way to low, then Mrs Muller got paler and paler and she got so confused. She was talking random stuff and more over she made her business in her pants. She was so embarassed over this and she told me she felt so sick.
Somewhere in this mess I went to the doctors and said to him, that he has to move his butt right now because the patient wasn’t feeling well at all. But the only answer I got was that he has way too much to do before that, this is what a young and overcharged doctor sounds like.
So I left him and searched for someone for help- It feels pretty shitty when the doctor in charge doesn’t help you at all and you have to search for help, because the patient is a human being and I had such a bad feeling about her.
But thank god I found a doctor, Claudia, she as one of our most trustwhorty doctors, taking her job way to seriously but that’s not a bad thing.
When I told her what was up, she immediatly came with me to the patient. Anna was still with Mrs Muller and tried to help her clean up. When we tried again to check the vitals, our technical instrument couldn’t mess anymore. That means, the blood pressure is too low and that is life threatening. But it wasn’t her only problem, because her pulse was dangerously low and her oxygen saturation went down so fast. So we gave her oxygen and got a manual vitalmeasurment and discovered like no blood pressure at all.
That was the moment as well, where Mrs Muller got sleepier and sleepier and at some point, we couldn’t wake her up at all anymore. Claudia suddenly ran out and came back with the young doctor in charge later, in the meantime, I sent Anna out to check on the other patients and stayed by Mrs Mullers side. Just right in that moment, out of Mrs Muller mouth and nose came blood.
Suddenly Mrs Muller woke up with a start and started coughing so much blood and even more blood. She was pale like a ghost, had such apniced expression on her face and started screaming like a mad woman.
Right when the doctors came in, I ringed alarm and we called the intensive care, who are in charge of emergencies in a hospital. Claudia and me tried everything we could to help Mrs Muller in that moment, with the little we had at our hands.
She was so paniced and had so much fear in her eyes, which became glasier and more unfocused the longer we waited. But it was just minutes until the emergency unit came in and just then, her heart stopped beating.
What is the first thing you do as a nurse when you see someone with heart failure? Yes, you reanimate her. And that’s what I did. Because Claudia, in that moment, was with her back to the patient, talking with the intensive care and I looked at the patient.
It was such a mess after that, while I reanimated her, a organised chaos broke out and we tried everything we could. And like a miracle, we brought her back. In the time of that organised chaos, she was intubated, reanimated with a defibrilator and she got a lot of medication like Suprarenin, a Adrenalin. It was a matter of seconds and just again shows how well trained the intensive care is and how good they are. Not everything is a success but this time I was relieved.
But Mrs Muller was not okay yet, millions of cables and tubes were now attached to her and they made her ready for the unsteady way to the intensive care, that way is always the most dangerous one. Because there is no infirmary or intensive care, you are in the middle of the hospital and only have the things at hand with you.
But the intensive care is very experienced, so they would handle that. All this happened just in like an hour and the day went on like nothing happend.
So questions in between, what happened to the young doctor who was in charge and came in with Claudia when everything became tricky? He was no help at all, he even said, while the patient was vomitting blood, that he wants to listen to the lungs. Claudia and myself, maybe too much in the stress of the moment, yelled at him that this action is a bit late. One of our head of department doctor came in as well and took him out then. Later I heard that he was badly lectured for his non existent actions when a nurse came to him.
Because kudos to our head of department, he trusts his nurses because we have the experience and that’s something I can boast about. My guts never lie to me.
Unfortunately, in the end, Mrs Muller died just hours later. She didn’t make it and I was shocked but not surprised. More over I was very angry at the doctor and very sad for Mrs Mullers husband, who witnessed like everything that happened. Later on I even talked to the head of department and Claudia about it because I wanted to know what happened.
The bronchoscopy Mrs Muller had earlier in the day scratched a blood vessel in her lung deep down. That means, blood was flowing in her lungs and she was loosing a lot of blood. And just at a certain point, her collapsed lungs tried to cough it all out. But the doctor in charge didn’t look at the xrays, where you could clearly see the liquid of blood, neither did he check on the patient herself when he was told to.
So in conclusion, she was drowing in her own blood and no one could help her.
This story happend last year and I can still remember everything like it was yesterday, it was a horrible thing. The doctor in charge got his lecture but nothing else happend. I don’t know what the husband was told what happened but clearly not the truth, but maybe that was for the better. We won’t know.
And I can say one thing, most of those stories revolve around that doctor in charge, I will call him Simon for now, but many more other things that could have been prevented of you looked close enough.
Like always the names were changed to protect everyone in it! I’m sorry for typos, I will check later!!
