Thursday. 7AM. Park near the hospital. Bring water, snacks, decent shoes, etc.
Now for the part nobody in administration seems to understand:
This isn’t staff being dramatic.
This is staff being tired.
And not the cute “haha I need coffee” tired. I mean the kind where you’ve been running calls all night, the ER is stacked wall-to-wall, nurses are covering twice the patients they should, mental health has a wait list longer than a CVS receipt, and then someone in a suit who hasn’t touched a patient in twenty years tells you the problem is “attitude.”
I was in the Marines before this job.
I have literally been in a war zone.
And I’m not even kidding when I say this: I’ve seen enemies treated with more baseline respect than some hospital staff get here.
Napalm burns hurt less than seeing friends commit suicide due to burnout and patient abuse.
Out there the rule was simple: medic is medic. You don’t mess with them. Doesn’t matter what uniform they’re wearing, what language they speak, whose side they’re on. If they’re treating the wounded, you leave them alone. Period.
Here?
We’ve got people saving lives while being talked to like they’re an inconvenience.
Nurses getting buried under impossible ratios.
Residents running on three hours of sleep and a protein bar.
Paramedics and EMTs rolling in with patients while being treated like delivery drivers.
Mental health staff doing the work of five people because administration won’t hire enough.
And then when people push back, suddenly it’s “disrespect.”
The funny thing is a lot of the attending docs are backing this strike too. Turns out when you watch your coworkers burn out and quit every six months because the system treats them like disposable equipment, you start getting a little fed up.
Thursday we’ll be at the park.
And before someone asks: emergency coverage will still exist. Nobody here is abandoning patients. The whole point of this is making sure the people taking care of those patients can actually survive doing this job.
If you see a bunch of exhausted healthcare workers sitting in the park next week looking like we collectively escaped a night shift dungeon — that’s us.
