Today is 19th January 2021, as I write this the UK will have been back in lockdown for 15 days and 42 minutes , what is essentially just over two weeks has been a lifetime for nurses. Part of the reason I dragged myself back to my laptop after a full day’s work is, paradoxically, because I am exhausted, because everyone I speak to is exhausted. We cannot communicate this fully because we are, exhausted.
A twitter thread by Meredith Knowles hit me in the gut yesterday. Meredith calls on nurses to speak out about what it is we are seeing, to find political power in our practice, to hold accountable those who have orchestrated the unworkable conditions we find ourselves in.
This is totally my jam, but I am tired.
It is hard to feel powerful when survival is our current MO. Everyday I tell myself do enough to get to tomorrow. There is no room for extra, for roses.
I will be clear, I am currently not a full-time frontline nurse. I swapped my bleep and blues for civvies and a lectern this time last year.
Monday-Friday I teach nursing students, I say teach, at the moment, I help them survive too. Then at the weekends I spend at least one day back in practice. I am tired. My creativity is at an all time low, I have found myself struggling to find words, I haven’t written in months.
This is my reality, and it isn’t going to change any time soon. We can book annual leave, but for what? Without the routine of my working day and with the absence meaningful tasks the wheels of my mental health fall off. That stint between Christmas and New Year was hell.
But isn’t all this convenient? Challenging the dire situation we find ourselves in was hard to do pre-pandemic. Many of us took on extra shifts because we were not paid enough for our regular hours, the NHS relied on our exploitation.
We are now taking on extra hours because there is no feasible way to cover the shifts. We work to keep not only patients but our colleagues safe, the feeling of travelling to work knowing you are about to face a shift with an understaffed team is not something I would inflict on anyone.
Now imagine that feeling knowing you are facing multiple deaths and acutely unwell contagious patients with an understaffed team.
This isn’t new, this has been our reality for months, for nearly a year. We did not have enough time to breathe and heal over the summer in order to face the mounting wave of covid we are now drowning in.
Draining a workforce of everything they have to give is a political manoeuvre. We cannot be a threat if we are too spent to rise. It’s easy to deny us a pay rise or threaten our colleagues with deportation when we have nothing left to give to anyone other than those who call us nurse.
For now, I want to try, as Meredith rallies us to, to push back if only just a little. To snap and snarl then maybe have a nap. Now is the time to be angry, but to keep going.
But we will remember that anger, when we have rested we will be too loud.
Rxx