And I’m turning into one of those nurses I swore I would never be. That horrible nurse that has the whole attitude that your pain is not her problem.
Every healthcare worker goes through burnout to varying degrees. Trying to maintain professional detatchment to keep yourself from going crazy while at the same time caring enough to do your job well is a difficult line to walk. For me, burnout has only happened a couple of times, and changing to a different specialty has always helped. This time, I’m not sure it will.
Don’t get me wrong; I love what I do. It is still very rewarding. But there is something that is causing me to lose all patience. And it is beginning to affect other areas. Looking back on some of my posts, I can honestly say I have been a truly heinous bitch at times.
I’m beginning to think I need to leave patient care all together and go into an ancillary position. I’m not sure I would find it as enjoyable, but I can’t continue to deliver the level of care I have been recently and call myself a good nurse. And I believe my patients deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.
About two weeks ago, one of my patients went for transplant surgery. She was very upbeat. She always asked about my kids, we chatted during her treatments; just the kind of patient who makes it a joy to do my job. In retrospect, it’s obvious I allowed myself to become too close.
She rejected the transplant, and her daughter called me just over a week ago to tell me that she passed from total renal failure. I was absolutely inconsolable for 2 days. Since then, I keep expecting myself to deal with the fact and move on, and I’m bewildered that I haven’t. I know this is not what she would want, she accepted her condition so gracefully and always told me that “whatever happens, hon, you just gotta role with the punches.”
I shouldn’t have allowed myself to care as much as I did. I know better. It is the thought that, on all levels, what I do is merely a stall tactic, that causes me to feel completely at odds. After 15 years, I should know how to cope with the death of a patient. And I thought I did. But I just can’t seem to stop myself from feeling close to the ones that are “special.”
From your follow-up comments, it would seem that your expectations of what that empathy really means may be troubling you. The 15 years of seeing people you’ve cared about having life-altering or life-ending things happen to them, and your own inability to change that, may be helping you to feel helpless.
But I would guess your empathy is still as strong as ever.
If the care you’ve been able to provide has other things affecting it, maybe the change – or a vacation/sabbatical might help – is in order. There’s just so much grief a person can take.
Losing loved ones is hard. Loving those you’ve learned to care about isn’t quite the blow that close friends and family bring with their passing. But concern for your patients, for whom your training and skills have been (I would assume) predominantly beneficial, would appear to me to be just the thing your patients really need from you. Nobody should expect you to work miracles or to stop Nature from taking its course. And often it’s just that very empathy that helps patients cope.
I do wish you some relief from the burden of it all.
I would agree you have not lost your empathy. I think you maybe did get a bit close to that patient but think by doing so you made yourself a better nurse. I know death hurts no matter whose it is. Our ability to feel pain is what keeps us human. Please don’t leave nursing. Take a vacation instead. If you still think you should after a vacation then go for it.
One sentence in your OP struck me: That horrible nurse that has the whole attitude that your pain is not her problem.
If this is true, yes, you are losing your empathy.
I work with nurses like that all day long and frankly, I’m losing my empathy. Not for the patients, for the nurses. I don’t know why people go into a helping profession–or stay in one–if they don’t want to help. Most of the nurses I work with have very little empathy for their patients. In pain? Their attitude seems to be that they will mosey down to the patient’s room when they feel like it. Have to go to the bathroom? I hope you can hold it, because it might be a while if they are chatting. And if I hear one more nurse complain that a patient doesn’t like to cath, I think I will scream. Hell, no, they don’t like it. Their medical condition may require that they self-cath, but do we have to require that they like it?? Sheesh.
I’m not saying this is you, but if it is, do something about it, both for your sake and your patients’ sake.
Zeldar & Sylphishone, thank you so much for the kind words that I desperately needed to hear today. I will be taking a vacation, if nothing else to clear my mind next week, and take some time thinking about which direction I want my career to take.
Brynda; what you described is precisely the kind of nurse I never, ever want to be. It’s so easy to distance yourself to the point that patients just become things, and to me, nothing is more insulting to their dignity. I would rather give up patient care for good than treat anyone with that amount of callousness.
Maureen, does your hospital have a counselling program set up for situations like yours? I would think it was sensible considering the burnout rate of medical people, but I don’t think like a hospital administrator (cue the inevitable dig at hospital administrators). If not that, maybe you could talk to a chaplain. They are trained in grief counselling and a good one won’t care if you are not a believer or play for another team. In fifteen years you’ve probably gotten a feel for which are the good ones.
You are not losing your empathy. You are grieving, which is allowed. I hope you can work your way through this because you are a particularly valuable member of a valuable profession.
Dropzone, I work in the private sector. But my company provides a “hotline,” and I’ve been in touch.
For some reason, writing this all out has been much more cathartic than talking about it; perhaps because I am forced to examine the issue more in depth when I put my feelings in writing.
In any case, I’m working through it. And thank you. Knowing I’m valued makes a difference.
Maureen- I have a friend who is an ICU nurse and she is going through the same thing. She cares about her patients, and sometimes perhaps cares too much and is emotionally devastated when somethign bad happens. She has been in the field for probably 10 years, the last few with a private org. She’s taking some time off to get away from the field and get some perspective. Might be worth a try.
Maureen, I can’t completely relate to what you are feeling but can on some level. There is a guy here at work that is Anorexic. It is unusual for a guy to be anorexic and very unusual for a 35 year old to be. I am watchining him kill himself. I have been anorexic myself an I have a very real need to try to save him. I really care about him. But, I know you really have very little control in this world. I for one would much rather have you as a nurse than many others I know. Take a vacation. Talk here. Take a breather. You will come back stronger. This woman that died wouldn’t want you to quit would she?
Please stick it out if you possibly can recover your equilibrium (the idea of a vacation is a good one!). I’ve had a couple of hospitalizations in the past couple of years, and good nursing made all the difference in the world! Not to my overall health, which wasn’t really threatened, but to my pain level and so on. The doctors in hospitals tend to be in and out, barely seeing the patients they visit. It’s the nurses who give the care. I hate to think what a visit to the hospital would be like without the competence and caring of the grossly underpaid, under-respected, and over-worked nurses who keep things going.
And from all of us who have or will some day need your services, thank you!
Go into child care/disabled type stuff. Did time for community service at Misericordia, changed me.
Get a overpaid civil service job, (smee auntie did, and went right back to public, felt she didn’t make a diff.)
Get it back.
Have you spoken to him about your own anorexia as a way to get him talking about his? Not “You’re anorexic and I used to be, too,” but ease into it, maybe joking about the birthday cake somebody has and how you would have reacted to it once. Maybe there is somebody in HR who can talk to him and lay out the options, like counselling. American companies are coming to the realization that a dead worker is expensive to replace.
