Aim Higher

Well, here I am - writing my second entry in an entire year.  I was busy, I moved, I hated my job for a while, I didn't get into a highly-ranked anesthesia school, I was on vacation, I worked too much overtime...  The excuses have an amazing potential to pile up and consume me but I need to aim higher.  And it starts today.

I'm going to begin by confessing that the focus of this blog may have been a road block to, not only my blogging, but my happiness.  Tal Ben-Shahar has a theory of the "arrival fallacy," or the belief that once you arrive at a destination, you'll be happy.  According to Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project, "The arrival fallacy is a fallacy because, though you may anticipate great happiness in arrival, arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate."  Nothing could speak more truth to the arrival fallacy than accepting my Transplant ICU job.  Having worked in abdominal transplant for the entirety of my career, I've always had a distant love affair with the TICU.  The patients were sick, the nurses were bossy, and the locked doors to the windowless three-wing trifurcation made it appear such an elitist destination.  My friends, family, and colleagues can attest to my aspirations of working in the TICU since prior to nursing school when I worked as a nursing assistant on a transplant stepdown unit.  It wasn't until I arrived that reality became transparent to me:  this was a scary, depressing, and thankless place.

Arriving at one goal usually presents another.  I was so caught up in the power and attainment of the clinical knowledge I would inevitably absorb that I neglected the emotional consequences and repercussions that came with the territory.  I transcended from an environment of walking, talking, thankful patients with the occasional wound drain to a world of inanimate and swollen shells of people with tubes and lines in their neck, nose, wrist, groin, mouth, ass, and penis.  I wrongly looked toward the older ICU nurses, who so notoriously "eat their young," for guidance.  Having been roughly seasoned with 20+ years of this, it became apparent to me that, in their eyes, these patients were no longer people but instead a casing with no internal substance other than heart, lungs, bowel - and even those things lacked vitality, requiring vasopressors, ventilation, and tube feeds.  After a certain amount of time as an ICU nurse, patients stray from being perceived as individuals with feelings and first kisses and favorite movies toward existing as nothing more than an empty suitcase that shits.  Unfortunately, this hardness is a mere side effect of such a difficult cross to bear:  seeing people die, day in and day out.

I often liken my job to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  It is hard to find purpose and positivity in doing Q2 hour mouth care, administering vitamins and supplements, and hanging blood products for a patient that is going to die, no matter what.  So perhaps I owe more to myself and this blog than telling patients' stories.  I need to also share my story.  After all, I'm the one alive to tell it.