Can you relate to the anxiety of having to work the next day? Can you relate to feeling tightness in your chest as you drive in that morning to work? I sure can. I have been a nurse for 13 years and it wasn’t until recently that I knew this needed to change, but how? It’s something I have always struggled with. This isn’t something we talk about either. A few months ago, someone asked me if I have ever heard of EMDR (eye movement and desensitization reprocessing). Um no, WTF is that?

Nurses…it is life changing. It is a type of psychotherapy treatment that helps people heal from symptoms and emotional distress or traumatic memories. If you have worked in the hospital for any length of time, you will see some trauma. I feel pretty strongly about this therapy as it has helped me out tremendously. I found that when I get anxious, my heart races and then my mind doesn’t function as well. Come on mind, I need you to be at your best right now!

We often don’t talk about the trauma that happens at work because A) we don’t know that these are even traumas or B) we are supposed to deal with it. It’s our job right? The problem is that we can become very jaded as nurses, we get burned out or we quit the profession that we worked so hard at in the first place. That person is bleeding out, save her life, move on, go to lunch (jk nurses don’t take lunch breaks) and pretend that it didn’t even bother us. That patient had a bowel perf and died. See it and move on. What if you are the type of nurse that can’t move on? You see that neonatal demise and think about that baby all day, every day. Are we supposed to live with this and pretend it doesn’t bother us? If you can, well kudos to you. It is nothing I could do. I struggled with these images and feeling that I don’t want to be jaded about them. I want to feel sad and then move on.

EMDR has helped me through this process. If this resonates at all with you, then I recommend looking into this type of therapy. Stop suffering on your days off and worrying about what the shift will bring you. Get some help. It is ok to ask for help.