The night my daughter told me she wanted to kill herself was not an easy night. I drove her to the Emergency room that I used to work in, thinking they would care for her best. What I found was not true, and as a nurse and Nurse Practitioner I'm going to tell my story in hopes of making a change to the world I thought I loved, the world of nursing.
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The night my daughter told me she wanted to kill herself was not an easy night. I drove her to the Emergency room that I used to work in, thinking they would care for her best. What I found was not true, and as a nurse and Nurse Practitioner, I'm going to tell my story in hopes of making a change to the world I thought I loved, the world of nursing.
I now want to leave the only thing I've ever known because I don't want to be associated with cold, judgmental nursing with cold punishing eyes. I didn't ask for my daughter to be so depressed that she couldn't find another solution. The cold look in your eyes at me and my daughter spoke volumes.
I hope you never are faced with this fear or with the overwhelming feeling of failure that I felt as a mother that night. Your job wasn't to pass judgement or to be so cold-hearted that my skin crawled. Your job, my sister, was to look at me and feel empathy and understanding. Your job, my fellow nurse, was to accept that I was in crisis and going through my routine was the glue holding me together. That included bringing my meals with me because, besides nursing, my life in fitness was the only thing that made sense to me and filled me with the same passion nursing used to.
Your cursing under your breath at the TV showed that you didn't see nursing as an art. To you, it was just a job that paid the bills. Your lack of compassion and not introducing yourself before you drew my daughter's blood showed me you thought my daughter was weak; while in my eyes, she is very strong because she reached out to me so she was able to get the help she needed.
And to you the nurse who said it looked like we were camping out. Did you consider not everyone lives the same lifestyle and some of us may need food because of our way of life? Did you notice I kept everything neat and then cleaned up before we left? Did you consider that I needed that food and water to keep me from falling apart? How do you know that it wasn't for my daughter who has food allergies? As far as my daughter's belongings we had hoped she was coming home with me and she did. But you made us put them in my car and she walked out in the lovely paper scrubs provided for her.
You didn't touch a life that night. Your lasting impression left me cold and disheartened for nursing. You left me embarrassed to tell others of the profession that I so dearly loved for so many years. If it's true nurses eat their young, it's also true that the nurse of today is not doing what the nurses of yesterday set out to do.
Yes, I realize that my daughter may have been your tenth suicidal patient of that particular shift or week. I also realize she may have been your first. Either way, she deserved understanding and gentleness in your care, not detachment and cursing and rude comments passed. I deserved professional courtesy and maybe a distracting conversation.
Again I pray that no one in your families suffers from such depression that they see no other way out. I hope that they go on to live beautiful productive lives. As my daughter will not because a nurse in the Emergency Department touched her life and changed it for the better but because her mother, also a nurse, never stopped looking at nursing as an art.
