I get confused by what certain acronyms in the English language, like Cpap (just learned this was continuous positive airway pressure) or EKG, or HHS (Health and Human services), but one ubiquitous acronym that everyone knows is the ER, or emergency room. I remember zero experiences with actually being at the ER luckily, but obviously it's a very important wing of the hospital. I just picked up the book "E.R. Nurses" by James Patterson (new release! in 2021! which means it covers the Covid outbreak) and the plight of nurses during the pandemic seems even grimmer than I thought. Some of the stories about life in the E.R. for nurses is really jaw-dropping and depressing for anyone who's not used to the environment of a hospital, but the sad thing is E.R. nurses get accustomed to all the injuries, the constant rush to the next emergency, like putting out little fires everywhere. Descriptions range from "patients coming in with Covid had at one point about a 50-50 chance of dying," "every single Covid patient who went on the ventilator died," and one ex-military nurse who said he never got nightmares after coming back from the war, but he got nightmares every night after spending time at a Chicago ICU during the pandemic.
And those were just the stories about Covid.... there were other stories about psychotic patients, a serial killer who came to the hospital with a machete, lots of "coding..." (much different from the document coding I do or the computer coding of other industries) which I now get means a cardiac arrest happening to a patient, which means an emergency that requires the attention of a bunch of nurses and doctors or else the patient might die right then and there. And I get the distinct feeling there's poop.....lots of lots of poop, urine, vomit, and other disgusting body functions, and that's AFTER getting over the sight of blood. It might be a little bit of a skewed picture because the book takes the most vivid and graphic scenes out of the nurses's experiences, basically highlights of their war stories, but I don't think the stories themselves are exaggerated very much; they seem very believable. They certainly seem more believable than the TV series ER, my only previous experience with life in the ER. ER did have real diseases affecting people and blood, operations, emergencies, etc., but they glamorized the operations to neat packages of conflict and resolution all packed into one compact hour. Emergency shift nurses work for 12 hours, often 13-14. And while it's true that unlike other posessions like teaching, where the work continues after regular hours are over, nurses don't take any work home with them and the work stops once they clock out, it seems like the mental baggage from dealing with sick patients, death, and people generally having the worst day of their lives takes a toll on nurses outside of work. And the work often goes longer than expected; can't take breaks and often have to stay longer to finish the work. This description of experiences matches pretty closely with what MJ has had to deal with, in a non-ER unit at the hospital: long hours, lots of work to do, lack of staff to help.
If it was possible to have more appreciation on top of the already heightened appreciation I have for nurses, I do now. They have really stressful jobs that got even more stressful during the pandemic, where honestly these are jobs that not everyone is fit for, have the emotional stability and fortitude to handle. And yet we expect nurses just to hang in there and keep at it while other jobs in the world are much less stressful and burdensome. It's funny how the world works sometimes; nurses often are at the front lines of life and death situations and comforting people in their last moments and coping with emotional family members, some of the most important things in people's lives, in a job that doesn't get paid nearly as well as some of the cushy jobs in America like bankers, lawyers, CEOs, white-collar workers who don't ever deal with that and require first-class air tickets, fancy corner offices in the big city, etc. while looking down at the "proletariats" or working classes of the world. Something about that is messed up, upsdie down somewhere, people's priorities and perspectives of other people are really messed up, and they need to read stories like the E.R. nurses's stories to get a wake-up call. I sure did.
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