This one time, in Nursing school...

[nursememoirs]

The Work Fam

As a bedside RN, you see a lot of sh*t, literally and figuratively. There are some days that you are drowning in your assignment, and you need help cleaning up your patient for the 6th time today. You just need someone to send that bloodwork to the lab. You just need a person to vent to about the wild family you’re struggling to explain EVERYTHING to in bed 12. And sometimes you just need someone to cry with after you have done everything you can to help your patient, and still lose them.

If you work any amount of time in any career, then you know what I mean when I reference the “work fam”. My work family has been essential and pivotal in my growth as a nurse. These men and women guided me through some of the hardest situations and circumstances I have ever faced. The pandemic has only brought us closer together, as there is no one else in the world who understands what it is like on the inside to care for COVID patients.

There is no one else who understands what it’s like to wear a N-95 mask, plastic gown, double gloves, eye protection, for hours at a time, and still be expected to provide exceptional care for you patient as if they are the only patient you have. There is no one else who understands what it’s like to discuss with families over the phone several times a day what is happening with their love one, if their numbers look better, or describe to them what the patient is actively enduring. There is no one else who understands how it feels to come home after a long day of losing patients, try to decompress, and come back to do it all over again. My work family knows it all.

Perhaps the work family is a crucial component to being a successful nurse, especially while working in a pandemic. Our work families endure the daily struggles, successes, and failures with us. They make us feel that we could come back and do it again, if we knew the other was going to be there tomorrow. Maybe we could come back and be better next time, if we are there together. We probably do not yet know or acknowledge it yet in the nursing community, but our work families are the ones who bring us hope, even when we do not have any left.

[nursememoirs]

Synopsis

This is the first blog post I have ever written. And quite frankly, I thought I would have a lot to say (since I’m pretty much always talking in real life).

But here I am, rolling my eyes, sighing, and deleting everything I typed up.

Until now.

For my first post, I would like to give you a synopsis of the last 5 years.

I have been an ICU RN for 5 years now. I can still remember walking across the stage at graduation, hearing mine and my friend’s names announced to receive our diplomas. We had endured Nursing school together; we did the damn thing. Now we were being released into the world to go save some lives, only work 3 days a week, and enjoy life without exams, clinical, or late night study sessions.

Except that never happened.

Little did I know the next 5 years would bring more tears, heartbreak, joy, and excitement than Nursing school. I would be put through tests that were far more difficult and complex in comparison to the age-old “choose the most correct answer” scenario I had seen in previous exams. I would be in circumstances that Nursing school could have never prepared me for, ones that probably the rest of the world could not fathom. What I read in textbooks, PowerPoint notes and prep courses prepared me well for the NCLEX. Everything else after that, I depended on the love and support of my family and coworkers to get me through. I depended on physicians, respiratory therapists, and experienced nurses to not only guide me through the hard days at work, but also passing along their words of wisdom to me.

Over the next 5 years, I would experience more growth than I had ever thought to do in my life. The first year I was out of Nursing school, I began working in the ICU at a Level One Trauma Center. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. The second year I finally (kinda) knew what I was doing, and could manage incredibly sick patients independently or with some assistance. By the third year, I was getting a little tired of the same old routine I found myself in while working night shift, so I switched to day shift. By the fourth year, the pandemic was just warming up in China as we welcomed the New Year, naively believing it would probably never reach the U.S. Even if it did, it probably wouldn’t be as bad as what the media was making it out to be.

But by year five, I found myself emotionally spent, burned out by ever changing guidelines and arguments about the severity of this new virus, the world shutting down, and living with chronic fear of the next COVID surge.

They say that it takes a village to raise a child, to support us throughout our lives and help us emotionally and mentally grow. What happens when your village is disappearing before your eyes, and there is no one there to help fill the roles you so desperately need to keep you going?