Mad As Hell

Who is going to be left in health care when the anger's gone?

Once I got interviewed & asked if I was a character in one of the stories I wrote, to describe myself. I said I was a woman hovering on the edge of middle age who was sick of everyone’s shit. This was in 2019. As 2020 draws to a close, I *think* I’m officially middle aged (40), l’m fucking done with everyone’s shit, and I’m mad as hell.

My next post was supposed to be about violence towards healthcare. (Hey kids, do you like violence? Work in the ER!) but now Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsay Graham have received the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Countless ER, ICU, and other frontline staff are still waiting. I’m lucky—I was vaccinated Wednesday, December 16th and I was proud and honored to receive mine. I worked my ass off for that vaccine. I need it, not just to protect myself and my loved ones, but my patients and my community. 

Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, has not been so lucky. They have converted multiple units into COVID wards. One after the other. Early in the pandemic Celia Yap Banago, an RN, lost her own life to COVID-19. They have a wall of peonies dedicated to the patients they’ve lost and the staff who cared for them wrote something for each patient that passed away. They are the TRUE frontliners. And they don’t have the vaccine. Officials from the Missouri side say they don’t have a freezer that meets regulations. FIND THEM A FUCKING FREEZER THEN. Set up vaccines at another facility that does. They have had over a hundred COVID patients in house since August. You do whatever you have to do—I’M TALKING TO THE PEOPLE WHO ENSURED THE PUBLIC OFFICIALS & REPRESENTATIVES THAT DOWNPLAYED THE SERIOUSNESS OF THIS PANDEMIC GOT THEIRS—to get these people their vaccine. Whatever it takes. Because THEY DO WHATEVER IT TAKES. 

I wonder, as Cassie wrote before, who I’ll be after this is all over. Because, GODDAMMIT, I am angry. 

At this administration. At the maskless. At the “bad flu.” At the sacrifices I’ve made for something that was preventable. At the asshattery around this election. I’ve come to realize that one of my core beliefs-that humans are inherently good with the desire to help & protect others—is shaken. I scroll through news stories and am aghast at the selfishness, the willful disbelief in science and facts and statistics. I am disgusted but no longer surprised. 

There was a meme recently—joking that somehow ER nurses are made of two qualities—the desire to help people and simultaneously a hatred of people. Now, hatred is a pretty ugly word. I wouldn’t say I hate people. I like a lot of people on an individual basis. I want to do good things and heal the broken. I also want to do that for our society, because WE SUCK.

My daughter had to list 3 things she wanted to be when she grew up. She wrote, in her jagged little handwriting, NURSE. FIRE PERSON (gotta love that) and TEACHER. 

Desire to help. All those occupations are public service. They’re are all grossly underpaid and overworked. Nurses are the best paid, yes, but is it enough? No, it’s not. Not when you expect us to suit up and show up and hold an iPad to allow dying people to see their loved ones. Not when the doctor says “I gotta check on this room can you keep them alive for ten minutes do whatever you gotta do.” When you’re being assaulted because the doctor won’t prescribe narcotics. When you’re combing through the contents of a miscarriage  for fetal tissue so that patho has a sample to help diagnose the cause of someone’s repeated miscarriages. Yeah, I wouldn’t consider myself overpaid, by any stretch. 

I felt proud of my child. God, this kid has a heart that could power this whole town. And scared for her, because we live in a society that will use that heart until it’s a dead thing echoing though the empty canyon of what used to be empathy. 

It’s called compassion fatigue, or burnout, or any number of catchy phrases. 

“Compassion fatigue is a condition characterized by emotional and physical exhaustion leading to a diminished ability to empathize or feel compassion for others, often described as the negative cost of caring. It is sometimes referred to as secondary traumatic stress (STS).”

Here’s my definition of compassion fatigue. “Everything that can be given, has been given, leaving only a shell. A numbness. There is no joy left to be had, not only in caring, but in life itself.”

Nursing and healthcare have capitalized on the nature of that desire to help. Someone who wants to help will jot leave shifts understaffed. They’ll stay late. They’ll work through lunch. They’ll accept another patient knowing they are hovering on that I can’t take it anymore line because SOMEONE has to do it. 

We’re all so fucking tired. 

We are fighting a global pandemic.

A lot of the public doesn’t give a shit. 

People are suffering and dying.

But the Trump train rolls on.

A frontliner is getting intubated.

Marco Rubio is getting vaccinated. 

These are things that cause COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. 

When I send a patient off to the ICU, knowing that, barring a miracle, COVID is going to kill them, and read a comment on social media about doctors accepting payment for faking COVID deaths, it’s a direct contradiction in my mind. I am experiencing the first, someone is telling me it’s a hoax. It causes psychological stress. And it makes me so angry, and I have to find a way to make these contradictions acceptable, but I KNOW one to be true, so the only explanation for the other is that the person that making that comment is evil or not very intelligent. But even if they “don’t know any better,” they’re directly harming me. By willfully spreading disinformation, COVID will continue to spread. I will continue to see more people suffer and die. I can only carry so much, particularly when there is so very little to “refill” my cup. 

This is the shit that will drive people out of the field, that embitter them, that makes them.....not who they were. Goddammit, we want to fight, but we need support. We need those who can’t fight on the actual front line in the factories at home, standing up for us. We need the battle at home to be just as important as here in the hospitals.

We need HELP. 

Before we lose more of us to COVID, to suicide, to compassion fatigue, to depression and substance abuse. 

We need YOU. 

Help an angry woman believe in people again. 

— the Midwestern One