Post traumatic stress from job

[jenny456]

Hello Fellow Nurses,

I am a labor and delivery nurse and have been out of work since spring 2007 from physical health problems. (I hope to return to some form of nursing this fall). Anyway, I have come to realize that I must have some form of PTS stemming from several traumatic incidents that occurred in my labor and delivery unit--some were my patients, some were other's patients I helped with during emergencies. I am having recurrent nightmares about returning to hospital work and reexperiencing those same scenarios. Does anyone else ever feel traumatized by things at work? How do you deal with it and not let it frighten you? In my case, I'm taking about women and babies dying (yes it happens sometimes), delivering a dead baby myself that the doctor didn't want to deal with, women bleeding out, bullying doctors, bad O.R. happenings, etc...Fortunately, this was not the bulk of my experience, but I have had enough bad things happen that I feel frightened when I think of returning. I am thinking of going into home visit nursing.

Thank you

[NurseCard, ADN]

Oh wow... bless your heart, sweetie. :icon_hug: You should not be having to live with nightmares. It sounds like maybe you do have some PTSD going on and you might want to seek counseling. I can definately see how L&D could be rough on a person mentally and it's one area of nursing that I myself plan to stay far, far away from.

[uscstu4lfe]

occasionally i will wake up in a panic. it's usually from a dream i'm having about patient care - i forgot to check a blood sugar in a dream, i forgot to put in an order for a CT scan. this is weird to me, because at work, i'm very relaxed about this type of stuff and it doesn't stress me out.

[chenoaspirit, ASN, RN]

Oh honey, Im so sorry you are experiencing such feelings. Have you tried counselling? Hugs to you. Please take care of yourself.

[oramar]

I did a thread once where I said that a lot of more sever cases of what we call "burnout" is most likely post tramatic stress. A lot of people agreed with me. There has been a lot of other people who have done similar threads. What hasn't happened, that I know of anyway, is a study actually defining what is burnout and what is nurse PTSD. Is it a continumn of symptoms, you know with the milder cases being burnout and the more sever cases being PTSD? Or perhaps the two conditions are totally unrelated. Oh and by the way, sorry you are having such a hard time, best wishes to you.

[lpnflorida]

Jenny,

yes this happened to me also my last year of working psychiatry. I will not go into the details of it. But the dread, the nightmares about the event replayed themselves in my head. I became hyper vigilant while at work. It was why I left that field of nursing.

It was simply time to do something different. That worked for me. Well, that and talking to my best friend who also use to work psych with me. To this day while a part of me loves psych. I know I could never work it full time again.

That is me, and perhaps for you going back into the very field you worked might be your answer. As I use to tell some of my patients you have all the answers. They are locked up within you. Now lets find a way to bring them out.

Talk with someone who can help you figure it out. good luck

[BinkieRN, BSN, RN]

I have a friend who went through the same thing except that she was in pediatrics. She was treated by a psychologist and was told that she was suffering from PTSD and another word for it in regards to nursing is burnout. She didn't want to leave nursing but couldn't go back to peds. Likewise she didn't even want to go back to the hospital. She found a job working for the Public Health Department and she loves it. She has been working there for about 2 years. Best of luck

Binks

[xos4eva]

Sorry to hear that you are going through this. Maybe you should think about going into another field of nursing. I'm not sure if i have burnout or PTSD. I've been working in a pediatric emergency room for 1 year and I sometimes have dreams that don't let me sleep the whole night. I keep imagining that I didn't triage a patient correctly or that I didn't fulfill an order that the doctor wrote. Sometimes I come home tired and wake up even more tired because I've worked a whole shift in my sleep. :-(

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

when i was off for six months due to a back injury, i had recurring nightmares about going back to work and having my patient code on me, having visitors shoot at me or stab me, having one of the house staff have a grand mal seizure in front of me, etc. etc. (except for the shooting -- he only pointed the gun, didn't pull the trigger -- these are all things that have actually happened to me!) i was sure i couldn't go back to the same job, didn't want to continue in nursing. for financial reasons, i had to return to the same job. after a few weeks, i was back to normal, nightmares gone.

dh thinks the nightmares were a product of the pain meds and muscle relaxers i was taking. i think there may have been an element of ptsd. my point is that it passed.

[CactusFlower]

I had a very strange experince not so long ago while recerting for PALS. A video was being shown of an infant in very obvious distress--the instructor hands me this baby mannequin and says "ask a question, give a treatment or pass." I sat there for an uncomfortable peroid of time cuddling this little thing in my arms, not saying a word, untill he had to nearly pry it from me and adjorn the class for a break.

My mind was sucked into a vortex--I had a complete audio and visual reinactment of a very distressing burn case involving an infant from my past. I could even smell the room! It was a time in my career I found myself completely shaken to the core, but was working fast and furious to save a life--no time to react to the flood of emotions happening inside me. Me--the nurse me, stepped up to the plate. Me--the person, was changed for life by what happened that day.

So, there I am years after the incident happened, reliving it! It hurt the same. The instructor knew exactly what was happening to me. He has seen similar reactions from other nurses--not often, but it does happen. That day long ago, when it all ended, me and my wonderful crew of nurses went for "choir practice". (We went to the bar) We didn't know it at the time, but we were destressing ourselves and licking our wounds.

[pagandeva2000, LPN]

I believe that I somehow suffered from some sort of post traumatic stress syndrome from nursing school. I graduated top of my LPN class, but there was something about it that I just can't place that make me say I will never go back to nursing school, may it be on line, a classroom or anything else. Can't place my finger on it.

I love nursing, however, because of the crap that goes on daily that pit nurses against each other, I can say that I do have dreams of losing my license, things happening to patients under my care and other unpleasent thoughts. My muscles ache, I am tense more times than I care to be and well, yeah, I can empathsize with you immensely.