The student nurse

You are going to have bad days. Days when more than one patient dies. Days when patients beg you to let them die. There will be days spent trying to keep a disorientated man safe, whilst also avoiding his sexual advances and ignoring his sexual comments. There will be days where you narrowly avoid being punched in the face, kicked or hit with a walker. There will be days so awful that when someone asks how your day has been, not responding is the easier option because your life now feels so unrelatable. How do you tell your partner that a patient grabbed your boob and simultaneously tried to pull you into their bed and nothing could be done becuase they have dementia? And you know that dementia causes behavioural changes and yet you have to suffer the consequences of someone elses disease silently because you’re a nurse and this is part of the job. How do you talk about the man who held a fist to your face and threatened to break your nose only to ask you a second later to help change his pants because he had wet himself and that you helped him but you were scared the entire time? Your bad days will keep you up at night, they will see your crying on your drive home. Bad days will wet your pillow as you close your eyes to sleep and in the mornings when your alarm goes off too early. Bad days will create an invsible rift between you and everyone else’s bad days because yours involve people dying and family members crying and children left without a mum or a patient left with only weeks. These will be your kind of bad day. Take your time to feel them, to heal from them. 

You’ve made it to your last year of nursing. Somehow. I think you cried more days than you laughed and you warmed many toilet seats as you hid from the cold whirling hospital hallways. You have washed more people than you will ever count, wiped more bums than what one would think was humanly possible. You have learned the power behind showering and the way it alters someones psyche, healing them for at least that one day. You quickly discovered the therapeutic properties of tea and use it like a bandaid for the soul, including your own. You have walked home at night and vomited into the bushes. You have gone without sleep. You have also discovered love on a level that can only be witnessed in the end stages of life. You have seen compassion and empathy and learned the strength they carry in saving lives. You have become so much more confident and alive. You have also learned what it is to be tired, to be burnt out and to question your dreams. You have watched someone take their last breaths. You have placed 11 bodies in bags. You are an amazing nurse. A nurse who shows up each shift and cares for those who can no longer care for themselves. I hope you continue with this last year, even though the doubt has grown and the dream has started to die. I hope you continue to find fulfillment and love for a job where compassion, empathy, generosity, patience and care are the essence of success in promoting life and leave impact even in death.