Dealing with Awfulness

There are some things that people should never get exposed to, yet they do happen. People who nurse see things that just should not be seen and have to manage things that are not supposed to happen. This is not limited to healthcare providers naturally, but they are the ones I am thinking about now. How do we cope with this?

This is something I have been trying to process since there was a terrible thing at work last week. Interesting, since I work in psychiatry and know all the signs and symptoms of critical incident stress, and yet when going through it, though I know theoretically that all the signs and reactions are normal it is the continuing feeling that my responses are abnormal. That I should not in fact, even react to things that are traumatic. I became really irritable, tired, detached, angry, and even had a flashback.

Thankfully, today I woke up and felt much better. Though I will watch myself to make sure that it isn't just momentarily repressed and also that I give myself time to continue to deal with it.

The other thing I think about is, after going through terrible events, how do we not detach, blame, become reactionary, in short-not think through things rationally? After all, that is naturally how people cope with these types of things-yet these reactions are not necessarily beneficial to ourselves or our patients. I can see the allure of doing this stuff too. After all, I left work Friday, found I had a parking ticket and my reaction was, 'How could I get ticketed after all, I just went through a terrible thing? I don't deserve this!' My deciding consciously, a long time ago, to park in 2 hour parking areas, despite the risk of tickets is why it happened. It is totally unrelated to anything to do with my week or the fact that I am a nurse. Yet, I felt that the bylaw officer should be doing me a favour and just know that I had a bad week.

I see this kind of reaction in other forms by the people I work with. 'If only this situation had been present, then this wouldn't have happened'. I got really pissed off by this, because in actual fact, the things they mentioned, would have had no bearing and would not have stopped it from happening. I though, 'Are you stupid? Don't you think things through?' This reaction was in part, due to my displaced emotion, but also came from the fact that I pride myself on being logical and become irritated when people are not.

Which also means that I get angry with myself when after a critical incident, that I react emotionally and without being totally rational.