code blue

When you're in healthcare especially working in a hospital you'll hear the term code blue thrown around a lot. A code blue is generally called when someone has having trouble breathing or is having some type of medical emergency. Funny Because that's how I felt my entire career in health care. Always feeling like I couldn't breathe, like I was being suffocated by the madness and the chaos that surrounded me.  All I ever wanted was peace and the longer I was in that environment the less I felt like I could breathe. There were days where I felt like the wind in my lungs was going to get cut off. Between the never-ending to-do list and the constantly having to put out fires day after day. Everyone acting like everything around me was a level 10 emergency. Meanwhile I'm just trying to hang on and not lose my mind in a system that pretends to care about patients and makes no secrets about the fact that they don't care about their own.  Even though oddly enough I grew up in a hospital more or less somehow working in one I always felt like I was the outsider like I didn't belong in an environment which I was very much familiar with and had felt like home once upon a time. Some days it felt like a prison. Most days I felt dead inside and exhausted. Wearing that mask of happiness that I loved healthcare and was happy to be there. I could do the small talk and just all around appear like i loved being there. It was the complete opposite. I was miserable there and spent most days dreaming of the life I couldnt have because a disease robbed me of it.   I wanted to live my life and have a job I enjoyed. Not this eternal rat race where you feel like you are runniing on a hampster wheel and no matter how hard you run its never good enough. Thats how its always felt in healthcare. Hearing good job was a rarity or it was rewarded with pizza. Side note: healthcare please find another way to show your appreciation to your staff other than pizza.  We like money a lot more than we like pizza. No one talks about what happens when the helpers burn out. You hear words like compassion fatigue and burnout. Of course it's all you do is hear about it. No one really wants to address how many people in healthcare suffer from both compassion fatigue and burnout. How do you know when it's time to exit stage left and take that final bow? Maybe whenever I get out of fight or flight mode for the 500th time I can focus on finding something that makes me truly happy. Once upon a time I thought that was Healthcare. These days I don't know what my career looks like in the future but I don't know if it includes Healthcare. Maybe if it ever becomes less about money and more about actual caring about patients then I will reconsider. I might as well pick out the color of my unicorn instead of thinking that the ladder will be a reality. Maybe it will be a blue unicorn. Maybe one day I can find my way out of this Code blue and learn to Breathe Again. 

what exactly is it that you do?

What is it exactly that you do? A question I was once asked by a previous employer.  One who had no clue I was part of the glue holding it together.I ran down my professional skills which all seem boring to me and apparently to them too. Minus a few cool things I got to do in my career. What is it exactly that I do? Survive. I have a PHD in that. Ive done it well for decades. Survive my fathers raging alcohaulism when i was a young child. Driving my first car at the age of 4. Then after that surviving his unmedicated schizophrenia where talking to trees and plotting his families murder was a common thing in our house. Conversations about how he was either going to shoot us all and how or burn out house down with us in it were things we heard every day. There were many days spent surviving, until my family and I were able to break free and start new lives. Of course before the schizophrenia of my father came my diagnosis with lupus. Immediately into that diagnosis in was fighting for my life while my kidneys were failing. Trying anything that would work just to get it to calm down. Again surviving. Once Pandora was back in her box (Lupus) within a year of that i was diagnosed with a rare bone disease which would require multiple surgeries, massive amounts of pain and finding someone who not only knew about the rare disease but could make me walk again when the bone disease crippled me not once but twice.  Again surviving. It took lots of searching and finding the very best surgeon I could to give me the ability to walk again with a hip replacement.  When surviving is the only thing you know how to do you wear it like a crown. However the downside of the survival crown is people tend to either look at you with pity or they think you are weak. But you know if they were given 24 hours to walk in your shoes they wouldn't even survive it. We've all heard the phrase don't judge until you have walked a mile in someone else's shoes. Its true. However most people at least those who haven't experienced more than their fair share in life tend to do the opposite and judge immediately. Those people could learn a lesson in compassion. Survival is hard I don't care what anyone says. Going through things in life where no one has any clue What you've been through is rough. You know you have reached the Pinnacle of survival when you go to therapy and even your therapist is amazed how well adjusted you are and that you aren't in some sort of padded cell losing your mind from all the trauma you have been through. And when they ask you how you made it to the other side you tell them about how determined you are to have a happy and peaceful life and that was the driving force that got you through. Being a Survivor doesn't come with a road map. But it sure comes with one hell of a story.