This feels like war

I do not have a military background, I have not been to war. So I can not speak for that experience. However, I can’t stop that phrase from going through my head. This feels like war. Here is my struggle and forgive me if it is completely off base. When one goes to war, they are immersed in it. They are with their team and fellow soldiers. Sometimes they get to interact with the outside world. They can facetime with family or friends, but they are in it. And then they come home, try to readjust to normal life, and it rips many to pieces. In the ER so many of my homeless, drunk, deteriorating, angry, lost patients, are old vets. War destroyed them. Young adults come in with PTSD and substance abuse problems. And it makes more and more sense to me why this happens. Normal life in the ER can damage you. I can say with a 100% certainty that my panic button is broken. I cannot tell you the last time I felt the rush of adrenaline. I also can’t tell you the last time I felt sad for things happening around me. There have been some truly tragic things happening to co-workers and friends that are not my business to share. I feel nothing. I watch friends and employees talk about the horrible things that happened to so and so or to themselves, with tears in their eyes and disbelief all over their faces. And I struggle to cough up an emotional response. I find myself trying to mirror their responses and faces and say the appropriate things and look as equally devastated. And nothing is there. I’m not a sociopath, far from it, I would identify as an empath. I used to feel everything. EVERYTHING. Then I started working in the ER, 2003, I was a unit clerk, then I became a tech, the now a nurse. It has been 17 years of an environment where you surround yourself with people having their worse day and it’s your job to fix it. People always ask, isn’t it hard? My short answer was always, not really, I get to go home. And it was true. Luckily, I have a terrible short-term memory and I most likely can not tell you about a patient I had yesterday. When I’m asked to tell stories at dinner parties (remember when we used to have those), I come up blank. There was this blissful separation of work and life, and for the most part I danced between the two with ease.

Then Covid happened. We were initially terrified at work. And then we would go home. And we were terrified there too. Then we started reading comments from friends and family on social media about how it is a hoax, or how it’s political or how they just want to go to a bar. We stopped getting coffee on the way to work because wearing scrubs suddenly became an invite for harassment. Co-workers had neighbors they have lived next to for years tell them that if anyone in the neighborhood got sick it was going to be their fault because of where they work. And we were righteously angry. Because we just intubated our first Covid patient, wearing our full respiratory gear with a mask on under it so you can’t read lips, air blowing in your ears so you can’t hear and shut in a room with a glass door you wrote things on if you needed something from the outside, hoping to god you got the meds right. Intubating and sedating someone is not a casual thing and suddenly we were asked to do this feeling deaf, dumb and blind. But we did. And then we got a break at some point, we peeled off layers and lifted the backs of our sweaty scrubs away from us for some air and enjoyed being able to breathe and hear again. Drinking water after hours in a respirator is pure bliss. Then we’re in the break room and as all good plugged in adults do, we pulled up social media and got to read comments about how friends and family think masks are shit and they just want things to be normal again. Next, we checked the news, yep, apocalypse is still coming, right on the horizon. I have never felt so powerless.

We are in the “second wave” now. We have tents set up and processes are in place, thank goodness, because the ever-changing rules and processes at work were crushing. Work feels worse now than ever. Yes, we have so many more covid patients than before, yes, the surge is real. Also, the world has lost its mind. Our psych population is exploding and people who would normally be reasonable are losing their shit. The ER is a place that sees only 2 types of patients. The first type is patients who truly medically need help. The second type is those who have lost their coping skills and believe we are the only option now. Let me tell you, it’s not pretty. People are sicker and people are crazier. We descend into it for 12 hours at a time and it’s more gnarly than it’s ever been. And yet our friends and family want us to show up in life like we used to. I struggle keeping in contact with anyone that’s not medical right now. My ability to navigate social interaction with grace when someone on the outside wants to complain about something benign is dwindling. I want to be left alone and I want to read books and sleep and hold my dog. I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to facetime, I don’t want to show up. But we do because our people need us still. If I was overseas in a war situation I would just say, I’m at war, catch you later. But I’m not. I’m home. So the expectation is I still interact like everything is ok and say I miss you to all my friends and family. But everything is not ok. I need space. I need to not be pressured to show up in the outside world right now. I need to not have to explain why I’m not visiting friends and family, beyond the simple reason that it is fucking stupid right now don’t you fucking understand what is happening, for fucks sake we miss holidays all the goddamn time for work and take care of people. We have been missing holidays for decades. Can you entitled fucks just stay the fuck home and suck it up for once to take care of us? It’s like watching your friends and family walking through a mine field and having them wave to you and be like” Come on out! We miss you! You really should spend time with us”. GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE MINE FIELD FOR FUCKS SAKE! But they don’t see the mines and they are adults and will do what they want. So I numbly sit and watch and wait for one to explode. And hope that maybe they make it through unscathed. And I go back to work and check in the 42year old male who’s oxygen in 80% and has covid but so does his wife and she has no symptoms, so it can’t be real right? But it’s hard to hear him over the screaming of the psych patient in line behind him in addition to the woman who pulled up next to us in her car and rolled down the window yelling for a wheelchair for her cyclical vomiting daughter who has used weed to get through life and now it’s the 10^th visit this month and why can’t we fix her. “Sorry sir, let me get you some oxygen, ma’am we’ll be right with you, sir, stop yelling and please get up off the ground, you can’t lay there, hey I need a bed for this guy he looks horrible, I thought 24 was open, oh, a medic with a CPR is going there, well can I get the next bed, MA’AM PLEASE STOP YELLING I WILL HELP YOU WHEN I CAN, ok sir I’m just going to put this mask on you and give you some oxygen, sir you need to stand up, I’m not dragging you off the ground, I watched you walk up here, laying down is not going to get you seen faster, no ma’am I don’t know when you’ll get a bed, I know it’s been a few hours, we are doing our best, thank you for being patient, sir if you’re going to stay on the ground at least move over into the bushes there is a line behind you, sir I’ll be right with you, do you need a wheelchair for you dad, wait, is he breathing? Shit. Can someone help me get him out of the car? MA’AM YES YOUR DAUGHTER CAN WAIT I’M A LITTLE BUSY RIGHT NOW, I KNOW SHE LOOKS MISERABLE BUT SHE’S NOT GOING TO DIE”. This is a 1 min window.  And this is just out-front checking in patients. We are at work for roughly 720 min daily. Meanwhile my phone is buzzing in my pocket, I’m in a group text with my family, they are sharing pics from when they all got together for funsies. I’ll see the texts later when I’m sitting in the bathroom peeing a nice shade of dark yellow because something about wearing a N95 mask and a shield strangely prevents me from drinking water like I used to.

 I simply don’t know how to operate in 2 worlds that completely overlap each other. Most of us don’t, most of us have never had to develop skills for this and we just find ourselves angry, hostile, overwhelmed and then simply numb. It’s like after an explosion in the movie and all that’s left is a ringing in the ears as the stunned character watches events around them unfold without being able to do anything about it. That’s what this feels like right now. I play the normal person role. I show up, I laugh, I try to be somewhat present. But there is just a ringing in my ears and a numbness in my heart. This feels like war.