Six years ago, I clocked out of the burn unit for the last time and said goodbye to IVs, night shifts, and skin grafts. When people learn that I worked as a burn nurse they often blink and whisper, “That must’ve been so hard.”
Working on a burn unit was hard, but not for the reason people think. Burn nurses walk onto the job each day expecting the worst. This protects us against emotional paralysis and allows us to focus on helping our patients—loading their IVs with Dilaudid, washing their burns, and slathering them with Silvadene. Burn care wasn’t always the hard part; often, night shifts were.
Photo courtesy of Alex Santos Silva via flickr.com (Used under CC BY-ND 2.0)
Unless you’ve stared 4 a.m. in the face, contacts blurring from dryness, you’ve never met the pit of night. Usually, by 2:30 a.m. my coworker and I had succumbed to silence. During the eternal inertia that stretched from then until dawn, I would agonize over whether another cup of coffee was worth the hole it would burn in my stomach.
One night, as I clawed my way toward morning, a patient’s call light turned on. I took a quick trip through Kubler-Ross’s stages of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before accepting the inevitable Continue Reading…
