Part 1 - The Nurse
I'm a Switch. Is there any other term for it? I live two lives. Three if you count the few hours I have to spend on my personal affairs. I change hats so often that, sometimes, even I can't keep up. I have an unhealthy relationship with my calendar. I do not have OCD, which sometimes feels like a curse. How much easier would organization be if I had a touch of it like my mother did? But I digress. Let's begin with the role that has defined me for the past few years: the nurse.
I spend half of every week as an ICU nurse, administering both medication, comfort, and critical care skills in near equal quantities; fighting tooth and nail alongside my team, my comrades-in-arms, my friends, to save as many lives as we can -- or at least to be able to say we tried our damned hardest to. I battle the Angel of Death, often for days at a time, and I don't always win. He takes a soul with him, a soul I've been killing myself trying to save, whose family I've been advocating for, fighting for, praying for. They become my comrades too, and I mourn with every single one whose loved one doesn't come back from that brink.
Sometimes, I come home an emotional wreck, a defeated remnant of myself, aching and ready to surrender the war. There are times when the distance between my front door and my couch becomes unfathomable. I shuffle just far enough into the house that I escape the cold tiles. My living room carpet is my friend. I lay on the unforgiving floor and, God, the rigidity feels amazing on my back. I vaguely remember that I need to employ better body mechanics. Need to work on my posture. Can't let my back go out on me. My mind wanders everywhere, anywhere to avoid the overwhelming sense of tragedy that threatens to bring me to tears. Once again, I wonder how I have survived this profession this long. How am I going to keep surviving it?
At work, we pretend nothing touches us. We snicker at the face of death and stare unfazed at loss of limb. No one talks about how ridiculously fucked up our world is, how we can joke around with a recovering patient while a body bag sits next door, awaiting "arrangements", how that 28-year old mother of one will probably never wake up again. No one talks about how much stronger we're all going to need to be if we're gonna do this for another ten, twenty, fifty years.
We all just go home and do our versions of nurse-on-the-floor. We do this for hours until we can get up again. Until we can wash off the day's madness and take our sleep aids and fall into dreamless sleep.
