Ultimately, my experience in working in the profession over the past number of years has led me to believe the opposite. Nursing is a job where you would imagine the mental health of staff is a top priority. One that is rife with healthcare professionals feeling vulnerable yet are conditioned to ‘just get on with it’. One that is so obsessed with bed management that it fails to truly support the ones who are hunched over like Atlas carrying its buckling weight. It was in that moment that my rose-tinted glasses were removed and I realised that this was the broken culture that I had stepped into. I was silenced and my feelings were invalidated. Get used to it.” My words were shoved straight back down my throat and I swallowed the painful lump that came with it. When I subtly opened up to a senior nurse about the shift being tough, she responded with a vacuous “Yeah that’s nursing. I smiled, demonstrated patience, and just concentrated on getting through the shift: I used to satirically joke that my part of my job title was being a punch bag for the HSE. Despite how internally exhausted I felt, I put on my professional hat as I always did. I remember one nightshift feeling particularly emotionally vulnerable as I had only slept for three hours that day and I had an overwhelmingly large work-load.
By the time you recover you’re thrown back on the conveyor belt again. It’s akin to being in a perennial state of nauseating jetlag. The thing that many healthcare professionals might relate to though is that seven nights on can be so physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing that you spend the best part of that week off trying to recover. By working seven nights I was guaranteed seven nights off, and I saw this as a positive aspect at the time.
I didn’t think about it at the time as I was in my mid-twenties, eager-to-please, and didn’t really have many boundaries around my wellbeing. Eight years ago, as a newly qualified Irish nurse, it was a common scenario for me to work seven twelve-hour night shifts in a row.
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