There are a lot of support groups out there: ones for grief, others for abuse, and quite a few for addiction (are there any for shopaholics?? Is that even a valid diagnosis?). I actually attended an Alcoholics Anonymous a year or so ago: the people were surprisingly upbeat and encouraging and just a bit too happy than you'd expect recovering addicts to be. But I digress: the point is, I'm aware that there are support groups.
...I just wasn't aware that nurses needed them.
In retrospect, I know somewhere in the recesses of my brain that working as a nurse is a stressful thing: you deal with a lot of different people (brusque doctors, emotionally-needy parents, inept care assistants, etc) and see a lot of really distressing things (there's a baby with just a...a...MASS. Like, just a frigging MASS coming out of her face. No one knows wtf it is...but it's like, ginormous. Like, bigger than my face and probably my right tit). But, probably because I've been working here for a while and seeing all this crap on a regular basis, I don't really see it as "stress," just another night on the unit.
Sitting across from a few representatives for the Nursing Support team, I become acutely aware that my job doesn't leave a lot of opportunities to care for myself. Yes, I go the gym and watch brainless TV on a regular basis to take my mind off work, but when I actually am on the unit, I'm exceedingly stressed for whatever reasnos there may be for the night: I need an IV, my baby spiked a fever, I have 3 baths to do and not enough time to do any of them, etc.
More often than not, I come off the unit needing to crawl into a warm coccoon of pjs. But it doesn't quite hit me so much since I'm so used to it, like kids getting taller; you tend not to notice if you see them every day. Just like it doesn't hit me that about a dozen babies have passed away since I've started working here (no correlation, I assure you).
The point of this entry was to point out that I spent about 1.5 hours in a support group encouraged to take care of ourselves before seeing to the care of a patient... and I promptly returned to the hospital 9 hours later to receive a patient that would make me want to tear my hair out. (Seriously. Seizing, ventriculomegaly, infectious baby due for surgery in 9 hours??? Fuck.me.up.the.ass).
Written 10.2.11
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