My friend told me recently to change the way I’m looking at something so that I make it a positive. She said it frees you up from being angry or wasting your energy on useless emotions that serve no purpose. She told me that she tries to approach every aspect of her life from a position of gratitude no matter how difficult the position seems.
I’ve heard stuff like this before, usually typed in a fancy font on some inspirational meme paired with an image that I wish I had taken with my own camera. 
See what I mean?
I wish I had taken this picture, but I did not.
While I agree that taking things and putting a positive spin on them is probably the best idea, I can’t actually say that I’ve really exercised the ability a whole lot in my daily life. Maybe I’ve always had more fun wearing my (admittedly boring) righteous indignation as a shield. Unless I’m in a really good mood or have put away a bottle of wine, my outlook is not glass half full OR glass half empty, it’s more like, “Hey, there’s a glass there, technically it’s half full of something and half full of air and there’s a fruit fly dying in the liquid and lipstick on the glass.”
After my latest rant against the dismal state of healthcare in the US and the ridiculous situation I was put in by my most recent job, she said it again. “Choose to see things as a blessing”, she said.
My last job didn’t go as planned.
I’ve been trying to write about this for 3 months and quite honestly, it just keeps coming out completely wrong. I hate reading reviews that are fueled by anger, they’re usually more like rants than reviews. I certainly don’t want to have my blog start out like a rant! Nobody will read it let alone follow it!
If I can’t reign my bitterness in, I’ll never get this documented and it’s actually a very big part of my story.
Maybe I should back up. I wasn’t always bitter and angry. Once I was happy, outgoing, hopeful, and possibly the most shining example of caring and kindness you could ever hope to meet. Then I became a nurse. It was supposed to be a back up career since I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. At this point now I’ve been a registered nurse for 20 years. Ironically I’m only now figuring out what I really want to do when I grow up. Most of my jobs have been in emergency medicine so I’m pretty comfortable with that pace, but I’m nowhere near as happy or as ‘shiny’ as I once was. I know what to do when somebody is dying in front of me or throwing something at me or spitting and kicking as the police drag them in for treatment involuntarily. I know what to do when somebody shows up after having been run over by a truck and is hanging on to life by a thread. I’m great at that part of the job. I even enjoy it. By now, I should be really good, right? Heck, I should be so experienced that much of the job is practically easy, right?
Wrong.
(Cue the ‘Soapbox’ signal. I’m about to get on mine.)
Constant changes, cutbacks, and general mismanagement of money toward profit management and away from patient care has done exactly the opposite. We work harder today than we ever have and, honestly, the patients are worse off for it. Maybe we have better technology and medications, but without someone to make sense of it for the patient, non compliance is through the roof. In school we were taught that patient education is an indispensable priority. Heck, it’s even one of the questions on those nifty patient satisfaction surveys! This stuff matters. Oh yeah, patient satisfaction. We’ll get to that one in time.
So why are we allowing ourselves to do only half of our job but still collect a whole paycheck? Because we are actually doing more, just not half as much for our patients. Why are we, as healthcare providers, allowing a system to make it all but impossible to provide adequate care, explanation, support, and comfort measures without killing ourselves to ‘fit it all in’? I’m not saying it should be easy, humans rarely are, but it shouldn’t always be a race that leaves us missing meal breaks for 12 hours at a time, skipping potty breaks, and in general causes us to ache mentally, emotionally, and physically by the end of each day.
Where is the outcry? 
Hello? Nurses? Where are you? I know you’re reading this and I know a lot of you personally who really do care and strive every day to give excellent care. Why are you tolerating this constant road block from your employers who value money over patient safety and wellness? Why are you allowing yourselves to consistently be pushed to do more with less?
My thought is that the job has become so impossible to do WELL without killing yourself, missing every lunch, and burning yourself out, that many of us have just decided to ignore the truth about how bad patient care in this system really is. We’ve settled with being simple gears in the machine and we just do the best we can. But fix the system? None of us really has time for that in our days. This complacency and ignoring the elephant in our patients’ rooms allows us to keep good paying long-lasting careers in a field that will always be there for us. I can’t say I blame anyone. Surely, my relentless demand to be allowed to give excellent care even if it consistently takes a few extra minutes of my time has not helped me get to retirement. Or stay sane. Being ethically proper is a hell of a lot more difficult than punching a clock and just doing your damned job ‘well enough’.
On a side note, Nurses take DC is actually happening in Washington right now. (Clever timing for this blog, don’t you think?) There is a thriving group of us trying to make a difference. It’s a long drawn out political fight to enact safe staffing ratio laws and hospitals and the money makers are fighting against it tooth and nail. After all, Administration stands to take home significantly lower bonuses every year if they’re forced to staff safely. But, maybe things will change for the better because they really can’t get much worse out there, folks. If I were still employed, allowed any time off, and less burned out, I’d like to say that I’d be there with them, learning about politics and pressing for safer situations for all of my patients. The truth is that I am so worn out by it all that I couldn’t even begin to get to that rally. Besides, I’m pretty broke after getting fired when I asked to take medical leave. Since I went ahead and had the surgery anyway, a trip to DC isn’t in my financial plan.
Our hospitals are physically dirty and money-grubbing, our nurses are overworked, and our patients are left to deal with it alone. It’s become ‘wealth-care’ and I don’t care who in the world hears me say it anymore. The focus has turned from patient care to corporate profit. I think the burnout has actually affected not just the long timers but even new grads have this sense of, ‘We’re doing just fine, and so shut up and stay in your bed and off that call light.”
I loved when patient satisfaction became a real goal for the nation and a tool with which to judge facilities by. But I’m about the only one. Just listen to all professionals in health care whine when patient satisfaction is mentioned, as if that’s not part of their job and shouldn’t be considered. I was a patient 2 months ago. I wanted to get good service. Who wouldn’t expect good service for what hospitals in this country charge?
Well, this has gotten pretty serious, hasn’t it? Here’s an interesting fact to lighten the mood. Obviously, I’m a registered nurse. I had my first hip replaced 7 years ago (lucky genetics). I was so disgusted with the way patients get the short end of the stick in our hospitals that I chose to fly to India to have surgery. You read that right. I had more confidence in the ability of the hospital in India not to infect, mistreat, or even kill me than I did our own US facilities. And I made a very good choice. The second time, however, right after I got ‘let go of’ the same day I asked for medical leave, I got stuck here in the US for the procedure. India was definitely a 100% better experience and cost me and insurance a heck of a lot LESS.
“But, did you DIE?” It’s become a warcry for nurses around the nation as we wade upstream against corrupt not medically trained administrations as well as increasing complaints from patients. “But did you DIE?” Well, I would hope not. But my dad did. In 2009 an ‘Organiz
ation’ disguised as a healthcare facility gave him an infection that killed him. Thanks for that, by the way.
Really, they killed my DAD!
Here’s another side note that I have to present in the interest of fairness: There are times where, “But did you DIE?” might be an appropriate response. For example, when someone complains that they have sore ribs after we did CPR and brought them back from the dead. Or, when somebody is pissed as hell at us for taking away their high after we bring them back from a heroin overdose in which they had forgotten to keep breathing. Or when a person complains that his throat is sore after we put a breathing tube in when they were unable to breathe for themselves. That’s where the whole, ‘But did you DIE?’ phrase really originated and even I once loved the phrase because of what it meat. Now, however, I see it out there in cyberspace among experienced clinicians all the time. Sometimes I hear it spoken from coworkers while on shift. It always makes me cringe. Tone your egos down a few notches. I know, we’re all working hard, but at least have the common sense to realize that from a patient’s perspective, we’re working hard at all the wrong things. Patients have a right to be pissed off, and they don’t realize who to direct their anger toward. We’re supposed to be their advocates.
(Steps off soapbox to sounds of crickets and gasps from former coworkers.)
I’m hearing Jennifer’s voice again. “Approach it with gratitude. It’ll set you free.”
That WAS my intent when I sat down to write this. I guess in that regard, this whole blog has been mostly a fail. I’m grateful for the knowledge I have. I’m grateful for being able to interact with all sorts of people on what could be the worst day of their lives. I’m grateful that nobody got hurt under my care. I’m grateful that the coworkers (who were not nurses, but amazingly supportive) helped back me up as best they could. But I’ve always been grateful for those things in my job. Those are not the things that make me get up on my soapbox and complain.
Healthcare in general in this nation and the way it has turned into a profit driven horse and pony show, well, there’s just not a lot about it that I can find to be grateful for.
Ooh, did you read that?
Dalai Lama said ‘If you can, help others; if you can not do that, at least don’t harm them.’
I hope the Nurses in DC are finding success. It needs to be different. I hope that you find success and a good nurse patient advocate. I have a lot of hope for a lot of things again. It feels really great.
