Post Traumatic Stress Disorders in Nurses? Coping skills

[0.adamantite]

In even my short career there have been events with my patients that are gut-wrenching. I have also witnessed other things that have happened to other nurses that I could never imagine being able to cope with. There are always those incidences where we will look back and wonder "What did I do wrong? What did I miss?" Even if there was nothing else we could do, we question ourselves.

In the event of a horrible event (such as a patient fall on your watch that results in a life-changing injury, a patient swirling the drain who doesn't make it, a terrible medication error) how do you cope? Does anyone have post traumatic stress disorder? Replay the situation over and over again, trying to figure out what happened? Ask yourself why you did or did not do something, check that blood pressure again, listen to your gut instinct that something was wrong, etc?

I haven't had anything like this happen to me recently, but I know that it's only a matter of time. It could happen to any one of us, and its a very sobering thought to me.

[anon456, BSN, RN]

Yes I have. I think this is something we don't talk about much. I would love to hear how others handle this. I think we could all probably use some therapy but probably very few people seek it out.

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

If you've done the best you could and something still went wrong, it's easier (in my opinion, anyway) to get past it. It's those times when you didn't do your very best, for whatever reason and THEN something goes wrong that are tougher to handle. I'm not so sure I'd label it as PTSD, but I was involved in an event with a poor outcome years ago, and there are still times when I wake up in the middle of the night agonizing over it. It wasn't my fault -- there was a breakdown in communication between shifts, and I was never given a valuable piece of information that, had I had it, could have changed the outcome. Everyone who reviewed the event said the same thing: If they'd had the same information I had, they probably would have done the same thing. But still, it was MY watch and I knew that I hadn't done my very best because my other patient and her angry family were sucking up far too much of my time with "pillow fluffing" sort of things. Even when I was at the bedside of my sicker patient, this nasty family would come PAST the closed curtain to ask for ice chips or an extra blanket for the visitor or something equally inane. Consequently, I didn't spend as much time with that very sick lady as I would have/should have/could have/might have.

You have to learn to get through things -- otherwise you won't survive in nursing. Some things are easier to get past than others. About a decade ago, some researchers were doing a study on the very topic you've brought up. They discovered that journalling helps most people, and it has certainly helped me. The advice was to write for 20 minutes, and just write anything that came to mind. If nothing came to mind, write "I don't know what to write" over and over again until either something DOES come to mind or 20 minutes has elapsed. I find that there are times when I don't even realize something is bothering me until I sit down to do the writing, and then even though I intended to write about something else, the topic that was bothering me comes to the surface and before I know it, I've written for 20 minutes about THAT. Besides journalling, the other thing that has helped me is walking. After a good shift, I can walk the dog a mile or two; after a bad one . . . . One time I walked my two golden retrievers for 11 miles, and then had to stop and call my husband to come and get the dogs because their pads were raw.