It is hard to explain what it is really like to work as a nurse inside a hospital. The experience is almost impossible to understand unless you have lived it. There is no real-world equivalent to a bad shift in nursing.
Most people do not understand how working three days a week can drain a person so deeply that they spend their days off unable to function. Or why night shift nurses sleep through almost their entire stretch of days off. Or why we cannot always be fully present for our families.
The answer is exhaustion — physical, mental and moral.
When I graduated, I knew nursing would be difficult, but I did not understand what difficult truly meant. My first medical-surgical job showed me immediately. Our ratio was eight patients to one nurse. The charge nurse, the person meant to be the extra support, also carried a full patient load.
Normal was med passes that took hours, often starting one round of medications before finishing the last. Normal meant having to push charting to the end of the shift, and hoping your documentation made sense when you were already 15 hours into a 12-hour shift. Breaks were rare. Getting to go to the bathroom was luck. There was no time to think, much less feel.
