I Love You, But I Don't Want To Talk About Work With You: The Realizations of a New Nurse

Nursing school taught me how to insert a foley catheter and speak with physicians in SBAR format. It forced me to perfect the (dying) art of writing a lengthy care-plan. But, "real world nursing" is surviving a trial by fire for an abundance of meaningful lessons.

Nursing school did not teach me that I would leave some conversations surrounding work feeling emptier than when I arrived. It did not teach me a polite substitute for "you just DON'T GET IT!" in a conversation-turned-argument with my boyfriend. These are sentiments I am coming to terms with on my own. 

There is a little voice inside all of us nurses whose internal volume creeps up as we discuss the difficulties of work with non-nurses. The voice I'm speaking of is the one that is brutally honest about how hard our profession is. We are ashamed to admit it, but sometimes this voice gets inappropriately sassy.

• "Oh, you had a 'tough day' at your finance desk-job because you had a lot of paperwork to fill out? Well I took care of an actively dying child and sat alongside her mother, tears rolling down her face, as she listened to her daughter's heartbeat with our stethoscope, knowing it was the last few days it would ever beat again."
• "Employees at your company get all these extra perks at your job because you guys 'work sooooo hard?' Well nurses are on our feet for 12 hours a day, sometimes without a lunch break, but you don't see us getting sponsored happy hours or Food Truck Fridays."

This voice does not care about rationality. It does not care that, in reality, everyone does face their own true struggles at work, and there is no such thing as an "easy job". This voice is jaded, and it holds face-to-face encounters with death as its standard for "tough". It does not realize that it is absolutely, 100% valid for meetings, failures to close a deal, and Monday-Friday work weeks, to feel stressful and demanding. This voice is out-of-touch with the world outside of our units. It forgets that we too are challenged by, get upset over, have our egos bruised from, wonder if we're good enough because of, and feel overwhelmed about things unrelated to nursing, and thus, it forgets to empathize with the justified emotions that come alongside any person's job.

It is a voice we suppress, because we do not want to seem (or feel) selfish, victimizing, conceited, or unsympathetic. It is a voice we suppress, because quite frankly, it would not look or sound good if we actually let it speak out loud. It is a voice we suppress, because we feel guilty over how nasty it can become; it does not align with the compassion we know we are capable of demonstrating. At some point or another, though, we do let it escape the confines of our mind, and it is met with something along the lines of anger, hurt, or resistance. So, we apologize and take it back, we eventually validate the other person's experiences, and we shove that little voice deeper within us and add another moment of feeling misunderstood to a jar on the shelf.

But, how could anyone besides someone who is routinely immersed in tragedy understand that voice? It's a topic I've touched upon before; fellow-nurses are the best debriefers. Nurses, thus far in my new-career, are the only ones to truly make me feel understood. They validate me when they share that they too are struggling to quiet that ugly voice in their head while talking to significant others. They give and take advice on how to balance the work-life scale. Even their blogs help me feel supported. But most of all, they are people I can turn to about work so that I do not have to debrief with family and friends. They help create safe spaces where we can share the difficulties of our days and then move on.

Take this simple text conversation with a fellow-resident. After detailing the fluid-refractory hypotension and emergent bedside procedures I witnessed/experienced, she quickly got down to the key-points: my day was hard, but the patient is doing better, and I played a role in that.

My father, my biggest supporter, might state, "You'll get used to it, honey". My boyfriend, gentle as can be, may whisper, without knowing what I'm talking about and thus not really knowing what HE is talking about, "I'm sure you tried your best". My friends, well-intentioned, will likely focus on how sad the patient's story was, and the conversation re-opens the emotional wounds I accumulated that day as well as potentially traumatizes them.

But, my nursing friends say, "I know", and they make me feel heard.

A quick debrief with a fellow-nurse does not require interrupted clarifications; it does not harp on the grief-filled aspects of the day. It allows me to get the events of my shift off my chest and wrap them up with closure so that I can give my attention to my personal life if I'm off or to tomorrow's patient if I'm back again. Discussions like this, I've realized, prevent me from bottling up emotions, help quiet the self-righteous voice, and remove the feeling that I need to talk about my shifts with non-nurses.

It clicked with me in nursing school, and I have heard it discussed during debriefing sessions in residency: my loved ones did not choose to enter the medical profession.

If they wanted to hear about the blood-bath in room 10, to listen to a recount of the trauma that came during change of shift, to understand the failed interventions leading up to a child coding, to picture the wails of parents whose son died before their eyes, they would have become a pediatric nurse. 

I cannot hold non-nurses accountable for helping me process the trauma and grief that can accompany my job.

I realize that work cannot be a strictly forbidden topic that we hide from any non-nurse, and that there is still a deep need in me that wants to feel more understood by the people in my life. I have a lot yet to learn and practice (I'm only a few months into my career, after all) when it comes to the conversations in which I do share aspects of my job with them.

In the mean time, I am coming to peace with the notion that I can deeply love the non-nurses in my life while not wanting to frequently discuss work with them, and our relationships do not have to lose their depth because of that. I am coming to further appreciate my fellow nurses, and I am beginning to see the value in the strength they can provide others, both inside of the hospital, and out.