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I remember discussing "moral distress" a lot in nursing school. They made it sound as simple as you're presented with a patient who maybe doesn't want blood but they need it to survive, or your patient has a different set of beliefs than you do.
It isn't actually that simple. 1/
It isn't actually that simple. 1/
Moral distress is going full-in and trying to figure out a virus that defies all efforts to save patients. It is doing things to patients that feel awful, but not having any other options, and no one has answers. 2/
It is disagreeing with treatments because they feel inhumane, but everyone is out of humane options when faced with a disease that doesn't care for humanity. 3/
It is going to work, knowing you'll be witness to terrible things that no one else sees. Knowing that weight belongs to you, and your colleagues, and no one on the outside really sees or understands any of it. 4/
It is being criticized for being critical of things going on around you, because there is still an unspoken code of silence in medicine, where the community of medicine cannot ever turn on itself for its own faults. 5/
It is going home and having to still be normal, despite what you've seen, whay you know, and what you've been asked to do because of a lack of knowledge and direction. 6/
I often wonder if others will look back at nurses like me, and hear our horror stories, and feel the same revulsion that I did when I heard my great grandmother participated in lobotomies and insulin shock therapy as a nurse. 7/
I often wonder how I will feel, and how that burden will wear with time.
And I hope that at the end of it, nursing didn't defend a culture that was never allowed to critique practices that forget humanity matters, even in the face of the inhumane. 8/
And I hope that at the end of it, nursing didn't defend a culture that was never allowed to critique practices that forget humanity matters, even in the face of the inhumane. 8/
