Back to school. This is (hopefully) my penultimate term in my masters program and what happens after that is not at all certain. I had hoped to have the basement done before I had to start school again but in spite of that I think I’m at a point where I’ll be able to manage.
Work has been interesting. There is an actual sick (in the previously discussed “sick or not-sick” sense) patient on the unit right now, one of the kind that I have spent the last 5-ish years specializing to take care of. The unit at my current place of employment has some very smart, very capable nurses and doctors but very few of them have a lot of experience caring for specifically this kind of patient. This is the kind of patient I would very much like to see more of on the unit and, I think, that is a goal that is shared by the Powers-That-Be at the hospital.
So there’s this sick patient and one of the assistant managers texted me to ask if I could come in to work tonight to help out. A couple more bits of relevant information; I worked last night, it was a pretty exhausting shift, and I didn’t get much sleep today for several different reasons. I’m really tired, is the point to all that. Even so, if this had been not that many years ago, I would have said yes without even pausing to think. I had told managers and physicians that I would live at the hospital 24/7 if that’s what was required to take care of the patient and I nearly did on more than one occasion.
I’m going to go on a little side-track here but we’ll get back to the main storyline in a moment. I have frequently thought that when I tell someone about the long hours and short sleep that I put myself through to take care of these complicated patients, they infer that this is due to some depth of character and dedication to the nursing profession that drives me to do these things. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, being a bedside nurse is kind of a shit job. All too often it is literally a shit job. Yes, it pays well, but really the only thing that makes all the, literal and figurative, shit worth it is if you’re doing something interesting. I pushed myself taking care of these patients because I wanted people to keep sending those kinds of patients to our unit. I wanted the admitting services to know that they could dump the sickest patient imaginable on us and we’d take it happily. Being a nurse is the only thing I know how to do that someone will actually pay me for so, if I need to keep working as a nurse, I need a good supply of crazy sick patients so I don’t get fed up with all the nonsense. This could potentially be a much longer tirade but I don’t want to lose focus.
The end of the story for today’s incident is that I did not go in to work. I really wanted to for all the above discussed reasons, but I also knew that it would really not be good for me and self-care won out.
Also, tomorrow we have our first D&D game in almost two months and I am not missing it.
I’ve said before that I think you would probably score highly on certain parts of one of more checklists for determining psychopathy. That is to say, your amygdala does not seem as spring-loaded to flood your nervous system with adrenaline at the slightest sign of trouble as, oh, for instance, mine. (This from a complete layman who knows virtually nothing about psychopathy beyond how to spell it.) Not to the level of collecting human-skull wall sconces (unless gifted to you by others), but to a degree where you might be able to see past or around the garden-variety chaos and pathos of your profession and see sick people as a problem to be solved. That’s not a lack of caring or compassion, it’s just a slightly different way of thinking about the situation, one that is likely invaluable for anyone doing the work you do. If people in your position suffer a distinct surplus of compassion, I doubt very much they would be able to remain in the biz for long. That is, unless the turmoil and human misery is something they get off on, which may make for a tirelessly dedicated employee but not a particularly healthy one.
All this to say that you are to be commended for taking the time off for your own needs, and that doing so does not make you an uncaring or selfish person. However, the fact that you voluntarily jump out of airplanes still means that you are, by all possible measures, batshit crazy.