Secondhand Trauma

[SICUshortCait]

This is something that’s been on my mind for a little while now. I’ve been hearing recently how what nurses are being exposed to is just part of the job. Death is part of the job that’s true, but that doesn’t change the toll it takes. Seven years later I remember the first patient I lost. I remember her name. I remember that she was an EMT who wanted to become a nurse. I remember that her squad was going to pick her up from the hospital when she was discharged. I remember how we braided her hair that day. I remember how she was transferred to the floor, but threw a fat embolism and came down coding. I still remember the chills I got when one of the nurses I respected most, came to give me a hug, but I had to stop her so the tears didn’t start pouring down my face. I remember that same nurse meeting me at my house with a bottle of wine that night. We spent hours talking it all through. When I think of grief and loss, I can picture the fluorescent lighting of the unit against the dark windows and the cries of the moms who lost their babies. Now as a mother myself, I have moments where these losses invade. I go to pump and I think of the mom who needed a hospital grade pump to donate milk after the loss of her daughter from a traumatic birth. I hold my son and I have to close my eyes and will away the memory of that same weight on my arms as I gently lay someone else’s child on the table of the morgue. I remember their names. I remember their funerals. I remember their families. Sometimes at weddings I remember the husband that came in to say “that’s my sweet wife you have there… we talked about when this day would come” and the look of love and sadness on his face.

The thing is I don’t even work at the bedside anymore. I left in 2019 before masks became reusable. I felt the loss, the stress and the under appreciation back then and I left. We had time to process back then. Each loss was an event. It wasn’t the norm. We came together, we mourned and we’re still haunted by them. What HCWs are going through now is not just the job. It’s the trauma of trauma. It’s real, and it matters and we need to do better.