I’m a nurse, and I will never forget the worst night I ever had at work. We just didn’t have the staff to sustain the number of patients on my floor- not enough nurses, not enough aides, no secretary of course (night shift. Even though the phones go off 24/7 with nobody to answer), not even enough lab techs to come draw emergency labs on one of my patients who had horrible veins. Started off the shift turning one of my favorite patient’s equipment off that was keeping her heart running. It takes a lot of time to do post-mortem care thoroughly, and I had 5 patients on a very high acuity floor. They couldn’t legally give me more than that. So I cry in the break room for a couple minutes and then have to pull my shit together because there’s 4 other patients who are being extremely needy and yelling out, I’m getting phone call after phone call, trying to page doctors on critical labs on my other patient while talking to the funeral home with two phones in one hand. People are constantly coming up to me asking for a range of shit from a cup of ice to oxygen tubing because “MY DADDY CANT BREATHE” even though obviously I have two phones in my hand, and the other nurses are nowhere to be found. I have one particular patient who has one leg and keeps trying to launch himself out of the bed because I don’t come into his room quickly enough. Which he did succeed in doing at one point, and I had to go for an emergency CT of his head. Meanwhile I go back into the dead patients room and have to zip her up into a body bag, and it’s just emotionally exhausting because we had watched her decline over a period of months and this was my final goodbye to her. I have like two patients who keep pooping all over their bed and require 20+ minute bed changes, and we don’t have aides to help do it so it’s all me. By the way I’m also trying to get all the routine shit done like vitals, assessments, scheduled meds and dressings on top of stopping what I’m doing every 5 minutes because I’m being interrupted. I’m physically exhausted, and during that 13+ hour shift I didn’t get to have one sip of water, didn’t get to eat, didn’t sit down for more than enough time to catch a phone call. The sad part is, this type of horrible day is actually something that isn’t rare as far as not having staff and having so much stuff that needs to be done with 5000 interruptions. What made it the worst day was saying goodbye to one of the unit’s well known patients and not even getting to take a second to process it because they want you to move her body and get somebody else in. I literally went home and my body felt like it had been hit by a truck.