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.