Humanity in the Hospital

Sometimes I wonder what happens to the heart when you have to bounce back from seeing losses in the hospital. There are times I feel like being a nurse feels like I'm acting in an absurd play, to know the right things to say and the right times to say it. Even on an oncology floor where death frequently occurs, the process of placing a patient on hospice and helping them die still feels slightly unnatural and out of place. Even with the compassionate and understanding friends I have on the floor, it still feels out of place to say "I'm sad" and grieve the loss of a patient. It often makes me wonder what it's like with the residents, who often don't have the benefit of time and space to process the things that they're seeing or the collectiveness of staying in one place to be able to recap moments shared with a patient who has died. Does it grow numb after a while or is it a mechanism of survival to turn off and keep going? This week, after a whole day of conversing with the wife of a dying thirty year old man, she looked at me and said, "It must take a lot of strength to keep working on this floor and see this everyday." Her comment made me wonder what strength looks like. Does strength look like the ability to keep going? Sometimes it seems like so little is talked about amongst staff about how patients affect us. A coworker of mine once told me that all we can do is just provide for the need and move on. Yet, we let individuals affect and change us every day, should it not apply to those that we care for? After watching my patient and his family grieve over their loss, I came home that night and for the first time in a long time, cried over what I saw. It felt good. I felt human.