Numbed.

You know you’ve become immune when you start to view patients as beds to be emptied or by their sickness (The acute renal failure in room 8, anyone?)

You know you’ve become used to it when the smell of shit does not make you wrinkle your nose anymore. Or you can look at wrinkled, fragile skin that tears with a simple graze. Or look at catheters and smell infected urine without blinking or registering how it reeks. All you know is that “there’s a urinary tract infection, people…”

You know that you’ve trained yourself to become fully deaf when a phone can ring and you can somehow block it out so that all you hear is a silent nothing. Just so that you can do your paperwork without interruptions.

You know you’ve morphed to be able to handle the wards somewhat when you walk in, look at the board and all the lists of discharges and new patients, grunt, and take out your highlighters. It’s going to be a long day, boy, its going to be a long day.

You know you’re known to the ward when you know each nurse by name and voice. Or you can spot them down 50 metres of corridor and just by the way they walk, you can tell who they are. And with a fleeting glance at the patient boards, you know exactly where each nurse will be.

You know exactly where you hid that last walking frame so the nurses won’t go and send them back down to the Loans department. And you know where to get that elusive form for patients to fill out when they go to rehab ward. You know patient 4B needs an a$$-kicking to get out of bed, patient 8 is genuinely weak, and patient 6C just wants to go home to take care of her blind, stroke-ridden husband who is missing her like crazy and thus, will climb the ceiling upside down if you tell her to just so she can be discharged.

***

No, I’m not quite like that yet. Although I’m quickly approaching that point and that scares the fsck out of me.

I guess I’m becoming used to this job. Its all right. I’m not exactly jumping around yoohoo-ing about it but hey, it pays the bills and for that, I can’t really complain. 

But I still honestly think that I’ll never really last a lifetime in this job. I think that life is too fickle, too full of energy that I’ll find myself somewhere else soon.

***

A few days ago, I kinda surprised myself when I was talking to the Pharmacist about some of the patients and how old they are and how I didn’t want to be like them. And then this statement.

“I’m not going to bother to get to that age. I’m going to kill myself when I’m 40. I’m halfway there.”

That kinda stopped me in my tracks a little. Just a little.