During my travels I asked myself several big questions…
What was next? What did I want to do in nursing? What did I like about nursing? Most important..did I still want to be a nurse?
After seven years at the bedside, from working with both adult and pediatric patients, on med-surg units and in the cardiac intensive care, to performing leadership roles like charge nurse and precepting, I hadn’t quite found my place.
I knew I loved getting to know my patients and their families, building rapport, participating in difficult conversations, and nurse education.
But I felt lost.
The last week of my trip I visited a friend in Denmark. Between hygge filled activities, she asked me question and question and I gave myself permission to think big, be vulnerable, and stay honest with my answers.
Slowly the pieces that had been swirling around during this trip (and probably since the day I decided to go to nursing school) began to settle, creating a solid path. It was one of those evenings that present such clarity about life, I felt like a secret window had opened and I could peak into the future and I saw how every experience got me here. From Baby K and the cold room, then my love of palliative care and schwartz rounds, to checking in on my coworkers post code, and this “nurse resilience” I couldn’t quite define… it all came together.
I wanted to work with nurses.
All nurses! From nursing students to nurses at the end of their career, I wanted to create a resilience curriculum I could teach in hospitals and universities. I would host small group resilience sessions and use my blog as a platform to talk about burnout, compassion fatigue, and other topics resilience related. I wrote out my bio, highlighting this new path and the work I would do.
A few weeks later I flew home, moved states, got a new hospital job, and settled into my next chapter.
I completely forgot the whole thing. Well, I packed the notebook away in my closet and gave myself all sorts of excuses why not to start: I needed to connect with my new coworkers before hosting them, then no one would come, and I don’t have any authority to host this. And to be honest, I got scared.
Then COVID-19 hit.
Around the world, healthcare workers suddenly faced an unimaginable pandemic.
As a PACU nurse, I was relatively unscathed– grateful to work at an institution with enough PPE and strong staffing, and lucky our pediatric population wasn’t affected quite as hard initially. But in talking with friends from nursing school and to coworkers about their nurse friends, who had travelled to the hotspots during the Spring and Summer waves, it was evident that the burnout, distress, and moral injury they experienced on the frontlines would linger for a while.That the emotional effects of working through a pandemic would continue for years to come.
How do we cope when our usual coping mechanism of spending time with friends, traveling, exercising, going out to bars are gone? How do we continue?
How will this pandemic affect nurses and healthcare workers in the future?
I don’t have answers quite yet, maybe I will never uncover them. But I want to use this space to explore these concepts, discuss difficult situations, connect through conversations, and provide any resources and support available.
It’s time for me to get to work.