These last few weeks I have been feeling my frustrations growing. I am just a little tired of all the "I'm right, you are wrong" mentality. Just a little tired of feeling like we are all running in different directions thinking we can get to the same finish line.
The thoughts that keep me from losing my mind over it all, is the reminder that not only do we all have the same ultimate goal (health, stability, normalcy), and the fact that we are all HUMAN. Most likely more alike than we are different.
I kept trying to write out my thoughts the last few days, and they were coming out too easily. Pouring from a corner of my brain like I had wrote the words before. Deja vu.
And then I remembered. I wrote on this topic almost a year ago...I was only plagiarizing myself. My last year self said is so much better than my this year self could have, so I'll let her do the talking...
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Humans are weird
It’s been two years since I graduated as a nurse.
I’ve cared for patients suffering from stroke, kidney failure, liver failure, heart failure, GI bleeds, respiratory distress, infections, cancers, pick something, I’ve seen it. There have been patients running out of rooms, flying down the halls on hijacked chairs, trying to get on elevators (all of this done in the NUDE). Pills handed out, crushed, meds hung in IVs, injected, and given where you just don’t want to know, and I just don’t want to talk about it.
Families yelling, families crying, families loving so hard they are sleeping on the dirty hospital floor, not to miss a minute with their loved one. I’ve seen patients withdrawing from their demons, shaking, sweating, yelling out in the middle of the night. I’ve had patients who just want to visit and share photos of their cats and woodworking at 3am.
I have cried. So many tears after long and messy days, spent fifteen hours from home. I have had to stifle giggles in rooms with coworkers when things get weird and we are in gowns and masks and goggles that get foggy, just trying to get our job done. Our job is weird.
I have seen people dying and it’s beautiful. I have seen people dying and it’s ugly and terrible and I try to forget, trying harder to count all my blessings.
I know that this area of nursing, these patients who keep ending up naked are not my forever career, so I try to find the lessons that I’m supposed to learn each messy day.
My biggest take away has been this: we are all just humans. Failing organs, hearts that don’t beat right, 500 pounds down to 80 pounds, wilting bodies after a life of neglect, or just a bad case of pneumonia, all of my patients are the same in the fact that they are HUMAN.
Just like me, just like you, HUMAN.
All us humans want, whether running kids around town, running the trails, or running the halls of the hospital with no pants, is just a little kindness. Recognition that we may be a bit more similar than we sometimes remember. We need to look for that human connection in the best of them, the worst of them, and even most naked of them.
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