I guess I've become sensitized to nursing.

[Katie5]

I'm not sure sensitized is the word to use, but that is what I can think of right now. So I was driving today and at the traffic light, cars had to wait for the heorifice to pass through. And when I saw that, I felt a lump in my throat, with different thoughts going through my mind.

I wondered if his/her loved ones had been there when he/she passed away. I wonder if he/she felt pain and if it was relieved. I wondered if he/she had gentle caretakers to help in their passing. I wondered so many things and I just wanted to rush to work and give all my patients a warm hug. It is never enough- kindness can never be enough.

[Callisonanne]

Ah I experience something very similar. Every time I see rushing fire trucks, police cars, or ambulances I get a knot in my stomach and my eyes start to water. It's like there is so much emotion that those people are feeling and then even more emotion at the place they are heading towards. It is truly humbling when you are in a hurry to rush to something that just really isn't that important in the grand scheme of things! Glad to know there are caring people like you that I might encounter on a bad day :)

[S.Gettes]

I think that after a little while, the things we see in our jobs, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, all make us more aware of things happening around us that we would have otherwise just not even given it so much as a single thought. Whilst we used to just see a heorifice or a funeral and if anything just think how sad the people must be, if we thought anything of it at all, our jobs have made us think more about it, about the person, the family and friends and what got them into the heorifice in the first place. It is something that makes us saddened because every day we see many people who are taken from this earth far too soon, and some that pass due to old age, but it is all sad and it is in our nature to want the best for them, we don't want them to suffer, we want them to go peacefully and happy.

[phlox]

I have had the duty and the honor to sit by the side of those who would have died alone. It is a rare privelige to witness the end of life, when it has comfortably run it's course and all it had to do, was done; and it is an unforgetable shock to see it slip away before it's time was spent, before other lives were ready to let it go.

[Katie91]

Bless your heart :redbeathe

I've seen way too many nurses become DE-sensitized and it makes me really sad. When that happens, it's time to move on to another field ~ when we stop feeling others' pain, we become ineffective. Not a good situation!!