Toebra said:
aircooled said:
One part that I found a bit strange is how emotional she gets. I can tell you, coming from a family with an RN and a paramedic in it, they are pretty hard core in that aspect, they have seen a lot. The only time I saw my sister a little shook up by something was after she was first on the scene of a friend of her's and his brother spinning in and crashing in a plane near her house. The brother was dead in the back seat.
But hey, people are different. She may not be cut out for that type of job tough.
My wife and daughter are both critical care nurses. Both of them are what I would consider pretty hardcore, unflappable type of women. I have seen both of them get pretty rattled on occasion. Actually the wife gets all calm and totally unperturbed when seriously bad stuff is happening, cool as the other side of the pillow, really eerie. After it is all over is when she lets the emotion turn back on, a lot of the time when she got home she would tell me about stuff that would give you nightmares. I asked her how she could keep going back to that place one time when she told me about a burned up kid, how she got the parents to snap out of it and take care of the kid that was alive. She said, "I am good at it, and someone has to do it." Only time she had to step out of the room in the ED was when they brought in an old lady that looked exactly like her grandmother who was bleeding out all over after an MVA, passenger in the car was in two pieces. The old lady in two pieces did not get her shook. Saw her Mema's doppleganger and she had to take a break. Freaked out the other people in the ED because, as I said, she is super hard core.
Her getting emotional did not make me think twice, honestly. No matter where she stands on this, she is clearly emotionally invested. Everyone is. She sees either a massacre or a pandemic of a scope that she can't quite grasp, and that tested her emotional capability. At least I hope that is what she is seeing, because the alternative is that she is acting - I'll leave my opinion out of that one.
My mom, MIL, cousin(s), aunt(s), great aunt(s) (who was more like a grandmother), grandmother, are all/were all RNs. All of them have similar stories to your wife/daughter. For my mom, whether it was administering CPR with a surgeon right in front of her, breaking the stitches not 3 minutes after he finished performing open heart surgery, or being first on the scene (in a literal sense as well as professional - she was at that time the elementary school nurse) when a pickup driver had a stroke and crashed into the school - brains on the windshield - or... well, I can go on but there are plenty of horrific stories. Always completely unflappable. She talked about all of it matter-of-factly.
But when she walked in and found my great aunt on the ground, sluring speech, she was unable to function for a few minutes. She said that scared her - she'd never been shaken like that before. When my daughter was dying, she had been in hospital rooms with a similar situation before, but when it is your own, you can't handle it the same way. And the entire time my daughter was dying, all the nurses, all the doctors, the resp-techs - I saw 2 of them tear up, one time. Only once - and it was when, after we knew she was going to die, I got to hold her for the first time after 12 days of uncertainty. The cardiologist - who is someone I would give my life for, honestly one of the best people in the world - said "I'm sure its been a long time since you got to hold her" I responded with "Its the first time". That made him and the attending RN start to tear up. And the fact that no one else did, and that they didn't at any other time, doesn't make them callous or cold-hearted. But they have a job to do and they have to take emotion out of it as best they can (while still having empathy).
Sorry, that got away from the topic at hand.
