the comment

Something weird happened at work yesterday. Someone said to me, "I think you're such a good nurse". Thanks. No big deal right? Wrong. That comment has stuck with me today. I keep thinking about it.

The emergency room is such a tough environment. Everybody who comes in is having a crisis, in their mind. We might think its stupid, but to them it needed immediate attention. Everybody who comes through the door is stressed. We all know people express that in many different ways. A lot of the time the stress is expressed in a negative way. That negative stuff is often directed toward us. People act out, can get verbally abusive and violent. Not news to any of us.

ER is a place of extremes. On the one end you have somebody who will die if we don't do something. On the other end you somebody stubbed their toe. We see people who are suffering. We see people dealing with really terrible things every day of our life. Sometimes despite our best efforts, people die.

In the middle of this is the ER nurse, trying to make sense of it all, trying to reason out some way of dealing with the extremes. Nurses deal with it in a lot of different ways. Its tough as shit.

Working in the ER, you don't get a lot of flowers, boxes of candy that you do in inpatient areas sometimes. People do thank us all the time, as they go up to a room, are discharged. Its routine. It doesn't really mean much a lot of the time. So when someone takes the time to tell you that they think you are a really good nurse, it sticks with you. You don't hear that much. You want to soak it up like a sponge. You want to take that comment and put it into a box where you can take it out on a bad day.