For the Nurse’s “Guilty” heart
What is Mom guilt? It’s the feeling of hoping your children will end up ok after all of the mistakes you have made with them. It’s feeling like you never do enough or are enough. Sound familiar nurses? We nurses struggle with trying to live up to Florence’s example in a modern age of computer charting, expanding skills and audit hoops to jump through on a shift-by-shift basis. Covid 19 has brought about a whole new set of areas in which nurses can feel like they are failing and shoot their guilt meters through the roof.
The pandemic has brought with it so many challenges that nurses, or any healthcare provider, have never faced before in their careers. We are taking care of very sick people who are alone in isolation. We are their only human contact. Yet when we have a high number of these patients at the same time, we cannot spend the quality time with each one that we want to. Nurses are feeling like they are failing if they are not present for each decline a patient takes or if they die alone. This leads to feeling guilty for not doing “enough.” This can lead to nurses putting up walls and determining to not get attached and just do the basics for every patient. No more allowing any one patient to touch them more than any other.
Another area of guilt for nurses is the virus itself. Nurses are getting sick. Nurses’ families are getting sick. When a nurse has to be out of work for exposure or for being sick her/himself, there is a host of guilty feelings around not being there for the patients and not being there for their already short-staffed team. Instead of taking their time off to heal or care for sick family members, nurses are fretting about the fact that their absence is causing further hardship.
There is another, not obvious, type of guilty feeling for nurses right now. For the nurse who is not working at the bedside; or for a nurse who works in a part of the world that is not greatly affected by Covid19, there are feelings of not being in on the “action” or making a difference in the job they are currently doing. Some feel guilty if they are not caring for the patients that are causing such an issue throughout healthcare and the world at large. Instead of feeling relieved that they are not being exposed to the virus and all the negatives surrounding it, they are feeling bad for not lending a helping hand in the front-line fight.
To these nurses I say STOP. If you are showing up to work and doing your job the best you can, with your current circumstances, then you are doing all that is expected of you. If you are home sick or caregiving then you are doing your job. You are taking care of yourself, or yours, and that is all that is expected. If you are working a different type of nursing job other than critical care of Covid patients, then you are doing your job. I can tell you to stop feeling guilty; but I know you will anyway. Nurses, like mothers, are wired to want to give over 100% to every moment. Wired to think about others before themselves. Wired to think it is never good enough.
You are enough. You are doing enough. Take heart and know you are seen. You are appreciated. Even though the catch phrases of these times: We are in this together; These are unprecedented times; This too shall pass; are incredibly annoying when heard frequently they are true for nurses. We are in these unprecedented times together and they will pass. You are doing a good job.