Welcome! I’m glad you are here. It’s been a long time goal to share my writing somewhere other than my Google Drive and I’m so excited to finally make it happen.
Growing up, I dreamed about being a writer: filling dozens of journals until the last satisfying page, writing stories about heroines my age, taking intensive poetry classes in high school. I watched Finding Forester with a notebook in hand to get tips on writing, and even submitted a story for publication when I was twelve years old. (Sadly, A Writer’s Daughter was rejected.)
When it came time to head off to college, I decided instead on a nursing degree but stayed hopeful for an english or poetry minor. Those humanities ambitions faded as I became immersed in science classes, clinicals and college. Writing became something I used to do. Here and there, I managed to scribbled down a journal entry, mostly as lists of things happening, the pure exhaustion and stress from the nursing program dumped onto the page.
After graduating, I followed an open door from working shifts senior year as a nursing assistant towards my first nursing job. And there I was. A nurse!
The first few years consisted of anxious sleep before shifts, finding my rhythm & establishing my nursing practice, mastering IVs, and adjusting to the twelve hour shifts. I wrote down the crazy-you’ll never believe what happened to my patient today-stories but never needed to write as an emotional release. I worked with adult patients, and yes, some days were mentally not to mention physically exhausting and I felt drained and depleted, but I was able to get in the car, allow myself the drive home to unwind and then leave it all behind. I was done for the day.
It was only when I switched to pediatrics– pediatric cardiovascular intensive care– about four years into my nursing career, that I realized I needed more to process the emotional intensity of this new environment, something longer than the car ride.
Suddenly, I was dreaming/thinking/absorbing these patients, their families, their stories, their suffering. I had always been good at keeping my work and personal life separate, but now it was seeping in, crossing over, affecting my non-work days and I didn’t know how to deal or process it.
So I started writing (again). Most of it was freewrites (potential word vomit) so I could get it out of my head and enjoy my day off but as the google docs grew I realized this might be a way to finally, finally combine these two parts of me: nursing + writing.
Here you’ll find some of the pieces from experiences that have affected me over the last almost two years and hopefully new ones, too.
My work stems from some guiding principles:
- That we are human beings first and healthcare providers second.
- That there is no correct way to deal with the emotional intensity of working in a high stress environment, such as the ICU or Emergency Department, this is simply my way.
- Moral distress and ethical decisions arise everyday in the ICU and there is never a straight forward answer to the difficult questions, especially When is enough enough?
- And it’s okay to give ourselves permission to grieve for our patients.
I chose this profession and feel grateful everyday I get to be a nurse and connect with my patients and their families during stressful times, but there is no class in nursing school or any hospital new nurse training program about how to deal with intense situations–such as withdrawing care on a patient, performing chest compressions on a child, doing post-mortem care, interacting with a family after their baby dies –to ever prepare you for these difficult parts of this practice.
Furthermore, there are no outlets built into the flow of the day in our particular ICU to process/decompress/debrief from what we witness. I hope this is not always the case. I hope we give ourselves the permission to pause and acknowledge the intensity of working in this environment, allowing ourselves, as healthcare providers, time and space to process–be it writing, therapy, deep breathing, conversing with coworkers, or simply taking a few seconds after a long day to transition before walking in your front door. Thus, we can remain a little more resilient and a little less burnt out.
This has been my journey.
Thank you for stopping by!