Nurse Burnout: Am I The Only One?
Submitted by H. Waterbury
Tags: mental health nurse burnout nursing
I have a coworker who said to me once,
“You didn’t come out of your mama knowing how to be an ER nurse.”
She meant at the time that we all are learning, and to have grace with yourself. This has always resonated with me. I was not born a nurse. I was born a gentle human being. I was born with the affinity to feel for others, but I was not born a nurse.
The first time I stood at the bedside of an elderly patient as an LNA student, tasked with getting them ready for bed, I did not instinctively know what to do. I have a very clear memory of working with my classmate to care for a patient; washing the face, under the breasts, the armpits, and hands. Rolling them to wash the peri area and working a shirt onto their shoulders before putting each leg into a pair of stretchy black pants. We shimmied the pants up to the knees and our instructor, a short, motherly woman came into the room and said, “How are you going to get those pants up?” My classmate and I looked at each other for a moment. We did not know. Now I think about that moment and it is humorous how slow and awkward we were. How it wasn’t clear that we should roll the patient side to side to pull her pants up. These things do not come naturally. We learn them. We learn them and they become natural. So natural that we forget that there ever was a time we were not caregivers. That we were not nurses.
When I drink coffee on my porch on a Monday morning, am I a nurse? When I walk through the isles of the grocery store, or sit at a stop light, am I a nurse? Or am I a human being? Sometimes I cannot differentiate. Am I the only one? One week blurs into the next and I have forgotten why I wanted to be a nurse. Am I the only one? I've been running and running. I am tired. But I don’t know how to stop. I look around at my peers. Am I the only one?
Some days it all feels so heavy. It sits there, on my chest as I shower, and get ready for work. It makes my movements feel slow, like a dream as I pack my bag, and get into my car. Everyone is driving fast, but I feel like I am barely moving, even though I am trying to keep up. A ghost in the background. Fated to spend an eternity performing the same task, the same routine. Get up. Look in the mirror and scold myself for not working out or eating better. Leave the house a mess. Go to work. Feel like I am not doing enough. Go home. Sleep. Repeat. There is a constant ball of anxiety, sitting in the bottom of my stomach, twisting and turning, saying, ‘you aren’t doing enough, you aren’t accomplishing enough, you aren’t enough’. You are just the nurse. Wait your turn. Stand in the back. Take care of others. Don’t take care of yourself. You are the nurse. You don’t matter.
There are days when I want to hang my head at those words, and other days where the sentence ‘you are the nurse’ elicits a different kind of feeling in me. Days where I wake up without an alarm and feel rested. Days where I feel the sun on my face and move my body in a healthy way. Days where I laugh with my loved ones and for a moment I am just myself. And that is enough. There are days where I go to work and I feel happy to see my coworkers and we have fun together and for a moment I am not the only one. I am part of something. Something important. Days where a patient remembers my name, asks me how I am and actually wants to know. Days where a patient touches my hand and says thank you and I know that they really mean it. Some days being a nurse feels like everything. Am I the only one?