Burnout

I am in the midst of processing. Not the things I intended to work on, but instead an entire catalogue of events I didn't expect would surface when I started this journey.

I have been a nurse since I was 19 years old. If you don't feel like doing the maths, that makes 24 years.

I started thinking about medicine as a profession when I was 14. Initially, it wasn't because I dreamed of healthcare. It was because I wanted to work with abandoned children in Romania. Eventually, I had the opportunity to do exactly that. From there, I moved into postpartum care, caring for newborns and new mothers. That led me into labour and delivery, and years of sacred work in sacred spaces.

I hold two truths to be self evident.

The first is that nursing is a compassionate and beautiful calling. We are invited into some of the most intimate moments of a person's life. Often, we enter as complete strangers. If it is done well, and done right, it can be incredibly rewarding.

The second truth is that nursing is taxing, exhausting, and physically demanding. It is a profession I actively discourage my own children from pursuing. Not because it lacks meaning, but because it is underpaid and because compassion and calling are so often exploited.

There is a persistent implication that because nursing is a calling, you should allow yourself to be emotionally, physically, and mentally drained. That you should tolerate treatment that would be unacceptable in almost any other profession because somehow your commitment to caring should make you endlessly available.

It can be a calling AND I should also be treated professionally and compensated appropriately for the work I do.

This is not the first time in my 24 years that I have felt burned out and completely depleted. It is, however, the worst.

Part of that comes from managerial gaslighting, harassment, and the slow erosion of confidence that happens when concerns are dismissed often enough. The other part comes from the unseen toll of working in a clinic that is chronically understaffed, under-resourced, underpaid, and unsupported.

When I went through nursing school back in 2001, very little was said about mental health for healthcare professionals.

I received some minimal advice about what to do if a patient touched me inappropriately, because this was to be expected and anticipated, and unfortunately more than once I have had to deal with it. However, nobody told me what to do after a patient punched me in the face during a stroke crisis in my first six months as a nurse.

I was taught techniques to avoid being pinned down. Nobody explained what to do when I was unexpectedly grabbed from behind and held against a wall.

None of these events were treated as assaults.

Instead, I was taught the art of compartmentalisation.

Take what happened during your shift, leave it at the hospital door, and move on.

As though experiences somehow stay neatly contained within the walls where they occurred.

I still remember my drive home after losing my first baby during a delivery. I remember the conversation with my mentor on that drive. I remember arriving home feeling utterly broken.

And somehow I learned to shut it all down before walking through the front door.

I would go to bed and then return to work the next day.

I became very good at it.

My first apartment became my sanctuary. I lived alone and protected that space fiercely. Few people were ever invited inside. It was where I recovered, processed, and gathered myself before doing it all again.

Then life evolved.

A husband came along. Children followed. The quiet spaces disappeared.

The opportunities to process difficult things became fewer and farther between.

Over the years, I learned new skills. I learned how to hold space without giving all of my own away. I learned how to support bereaved families without carrying every emotion in the room home with me.

What I never mastered was coming home after thirteen hours of giving everything I had and still having enough left for the people waiting there.

Because nobody rescues you from the next two or three hours.

The moment you walk through the door, your family needs you too.

Children are like eager little adorable leeches. They have waited all day to soak you up the second you arrive home.

One of the great lies of parenthood is being told that the baby years are the hardest.

The teenage years are not for the faint of heart, they are beautiful and life changing, but incredibly draining.

The problem is sometimes the compartments get full, and if you never make the time to unlock the doors and work through it, it just sort of live in you and builds up. 

Two months ago, I started having panic attacks.

If I am being honest, I was probably having smaller ones last year and simply didn't recognise them for what they were.

I found myself unable to walk from the bus stop into the hospital without disappearing into a playlist and a pair of headphones. I needed something to disconnect from reality until the exact second I had to step into the clinic and begin my shift.

In a classic cliché, my first full-scale panic attack felt like a heart attack at the end of my shift. In true nurse fashion, I went home first, tried a hot shower and some Tylenol, when that didn't help I spent the night in the Emergency Department because I genuinely wasn't sure what else it could be.

I had seriously underestimated the chest pain component of panic. 

It is an experience.

So now I am taking some time to process and untangle things.

Time to work out what comes next.

Part of that work has been recognising something uncomfortable: no amount of personal growth, therapy, resilience, mindfulness, coping strategies, or self-reflection can compensate for a system that is fundamentally broken.

At some point, the problem stops being your ability to cope.

The problem becomes the environment itself.

Returning to a system that will not change, that continues to use people up and spit them out before moving on to the next new nurse, feels less and less like resilience and more and more like self-abandonment.

I don't know what comes next yet. I only know that after spending two decades teaching women to listen to their bodies, trust their instincts, and honour their limits, it might finally be time to take my own advice.