Tomorrow is my last day as a bedside nurse.

And today is Nurses Day, or more legalistically, Florence Nightengale’s birthday. Her official title when you google her is Statistician. And yeah, that’s accurate, but she was a nursing statistician. She brought statistics, empirical data, and the scientific method into the nursing field, and her actions bettered the world you live in today.

Tonight, I came home after my shift to find my face covered in zits. Well, maybe not covered, but a significant outbreak has occurred, folks. Red alert. I repeat: Red. Alert. Puberty HAS RETURNED. All in a 12 hour span.

In the last 2.5 months (yes, that’s pre-pandemic for those of you counting), I have gained 20 lbs.

On average, on the nights surrounding work, I get about 5 hours of sleep. That’s mostly from anxiety. Some of you closer friends may know, but I do fight both depression and anxiety. (See The Pokey Green Monster series earlier in my blog.) Anxiety manifests in me as tension and inability sleep, bitterness, sharp and hateful words, and at times, difficulty breathing. Depression manifests as an inability to move. Like, I’m lucky if I can get up to go to the bathroom. Now you’re starting to understand the 20 lbs and lack of sleep. Alcohol helps, but when you use it as a dependency and evasion tactic, that’s called alcoholism.

Tomorrow is my last day as a bedside nurse.

I have worked in the Operating Room on the urology team during the day and transplant team at night. I have worked the Burn ICU. I have worked in 9 different states as a travel nurse. I have worked in every ICU except neonatal. (Every one needs a hero, and NICU nurses are mine. Ain’t no way I’m touchin’ a baby that small with an IV needle.) I have worked in the Emergency Department. I have worked in union hospitals and non-union hospitals. (Believe me, you get better care as a patient in union hospitals.)

I’ve held hands of people as they died and then put their body into a bag. I have told mothers their sons were alive. I have seen a burn patient take their first walk in new skin. I have seen a patient drain the orange from their skin in a matter of minutes after a liver transplant. I have consoled families. I have broken ribs during CPR. I have been kicked in the chest, punched, scratched, groped, stalked, and threatened. I have walked out of a newly dead patient’s room and next door rejoiced with the other patient that her biopsy was negative. I watched a Disney movie with my patient when his mother couldn’t be there because of a pandemic.

There are some patients from last week whose name I can’t remember. But there are others I will never forget and I truly hope to see them in the afterlife. There are some that I pray for every day. And there are some that I still struggle to forgive.

Tomorrow is my last day as a bedside nurse.

I am so grateful for the knowledge this career has given me. I am so grateful for the empathy and experience which it has graced me. And I am so done, so tired, so burned, so exhausted, so muddled. I don’t function well anymore. My priorities have altered, my relationships suffered. I am hardened. I am harsh. I am bitter and judgmental. I am not the person I want to be. I used to be joyful, childlike. I want that back. Is that return possible? I think so. Look at people like Fr. Roman Braga; he told the silliest jokes to me as a child. And yet, he spent some horrifying years in Romanian Communist camps.

Monday I begin a new job as a clinical coordinator for a kidney transplant team. I’ll be working with the living kidney donors. Benevolent, healthy people willing to give an organ to another. Healthy, happy, kind people: not exactly the people I’m used to caring for. And here I am, in the middle of a respiratory pandemic, leaving the ICU. There’s a lot of guilt about that. From myself, but also from other nurses. We’ve all got to walk away at some point, even Flo did. (Literally, she was bedridden towards the end of her career and suffered from depression.) I have hit my breaking point in that I feel I’m no longer doing my patients any good. I can physically do the job, but humans don’t need a robot completing tasks, they need another human to care about them. And that requires empathy and energy. I am surprisingly low on the first, and running on empty with the second. A large part of that is working through the first round of this pandemic, but let’s be honest, I’ve been worn by this job since day one. A horribly painful and virulent disease exposing our entire nation’s healthcare system as a house of cards…that didn’t help, but it’s not the primary reason I’m leaving.

More on my experience working with COViD patients later, but for now, I have to get up for work in the morning.