Getting attached

[guest5122016]

Hello all,

I'm fairly new to the nursing world as a cna, I've been working as one for about three months now. I work in a long term car facility but I work on the rehab floor, so most of my patients leave to go home or continue by moving to the long term car upstairs. Recently we have been receiving more

patients that are not your typical knee and hip replacement patients, they are older and sicker. I recently got very attached to this one women and went back to her home and then passed away, she was 95. But I'm really not use to the death of patients yet and I'm afraid of getting too attached again. Any advice on how to handle this, I'm just heartbroken

thank you!

[NurseCard, ADN]

Please do not let this discourage you or make you question your career

choice. You sound like a fine CNA.

Death IS something that you are going to see, and unfortunately

fairly often, if you work in a LTC facility. Even if you work the

rehab side, as you have found out.

I think that time and wisdom are the only things that make

dealing with it a bit easier.

Again, don't let this steer you away from the field. LTC

needs people like you.

[Davey Do]

I can add no more than what NurseCard wrote, LKhodunov, except to reinforce it and let you know my heart goes out to you.

[guest5122016]

Thank you all so much for the support it means a lot!

[AliNajaCat]

Learning to set personal boundaries is an important thing when your work requires you to break so many. We touch and look and ask and do so much you'd get arrested for if you tried it on a stranger everywhere else in real life; many are reserved for relationships where we have established emotional ties consensually.

Emotional boundaries are what you're running into now. Try to think of how to protect your emotional life at work. Dave Do and the other psych folks here can help with that better than I can, but been there, done that, we all have.

[TheCommuter, BSN, RN]

I concur with the importance of emotional boundaries. My strongest emotions and attachments are reserved for the people in my personal life such as certain family members and friends.

It is possible to care about patients' outcomes without becoming attached to them. If we grow attached to every single patient or nursing home resident, the seeds of burnout and sadness are planted, only to suffocate us when we least expect it.

[sroseyos]

Agreed. Losing patients will never be easy, but everyone finds their own way to maintain a professional distance while also genuinely caring. You may be interested in some of the stories from a series that "Humans of New York" did on the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which includes a lot of insight from nurses, MDs and other healthcare professionals on working in such an emotionally devastating setting as a pediatric cancer ward, particularly this perspective from a nurse:

The nurse is in that room day in and day out. You give a piece of yourself to that child. But intimacy has its dangers. You have to be able to set it aside. You can't come in on your days off. You have to be able to go home at the end of the day and have a glass of wine, or go rock climbing, or visit with friends. If you can't go home and rebuild, you'll burn out. You won't be able to handle the losses if you're just surviving off the wins. Because the losses are severe. You were allowed into that child's life at their most intimate time, and you were trusted. And that is a gift. And even in death, you learned something from that child that made you a better person and a better nurse.”