"Another Day at the Edge of Breaking"
The alarm goes off before the sun even thinks about rising. My body aches in places I didn’t know could ache, but there’s no time to acknowledge it. Scrubs on. Hair up. Coffee down. The day starts whether I’m ready or not.
By 7:00 a.m., the ward is already buzzing. My assignment sheet lands in my hand — the names and room numbers that will own my day. I scan it, and my stomach tightens. Again, I’ve got the complicated ones. The “high maintenance” patients. The ones no one else wants. I don’t even bother wondering how the others manage to avoid them — I already know the answer, and it’s not luck.
I rush into my first room. The patient’s vitals are bad. I know it before I even check the monitor — you can feel when something is wrong. I’m still gloving up when the first page comes through: another patient’s IV has infiltrated. I juggle the tasks, my brain mapping the fastest route between rooms like a worn-out GPS. Halfway through my rounds, I lose a patient. One moment, I’m charting their morning vitals; the next, the monitors scream and the world shrinks into seconds that matter more than anything else. We try. We always try. Chest compressions, epinephrine, oxygen. My arms are shaking, my breath ragged, but we keep going until the doctor calls it.
And then… silence. The silence after a code is the worst kind — it hums in your bones. I want to stand there and just be for a moment, but the pager is already demanding me somewhere else. There’s no time to grieve. No time to cry. There’s barely time to wash my hands.
By noon, I realize I haven’t eaten. I’ve been yelled at twice — once by a doctor who didn’t like my charting speed, once by a family member who’s certain their loved one isn’t getting enough attention. I swallow my frustration and keep moving, because stopping isn’t an option. I spend thirty minutes trying to convince a patient to take their meds, knowing full well they’ve given up on living. It’s the cruelest kind of work — saving someone who doesn’t want to be saved. You leave the room feeling like you’ve just patched a sinking ship with paper tape.
The documentation piles up like snow. Every med, every shift in vitals, every intervention. The computer screen blurs as I type, and the clock insists it’s still hours until shift change. By the time I hand off to the night nurse, I feel like a ghost of myself. My feet throb. My shoulders burn. My mind is a fog of adrenaline and exhaustion.
I step outside into the cool evening air, but instead of relief, there’s just… emptiness. I want to cry, to break down, to let the weight of the day crush me. But I don’t. Because tomorrow, it all starts again.
If you ever meet a nurse, really see them. Not the uniform, not the clipboard, not the polite smile they’ve trained themselves to keep in place — but the person underneath. The one who carries grief in their pockets and guilt in their lungs. The one who saves lives in rooms where no one thanks them, and then goes home with hands that still smell faintly of antiseptic. We are not unbreakable. We are not untouchable. We are just people who hold it together because someone has to — and sometimes, we wish it didn’t always have to be us.
