I want to tell you about the kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep.
It is not the tired that a good night fixes.
It is not the tired that a vacation addresses.
It is the tired that comes from being wrong about something for a very long time and spending all your energy managing around the wrongness without naming it.
I have been that kind of tired for approximately four years.
Maybe longer.
Maybe from the beginning.
I am still working that out.
My name is Angela Brooks.
I am forty-two years old.
I am a registered nurse.
I have been one for fourteen years, working primarily at St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center, which is the largest hospital in the county and which is where I have spent more of my adult life than in any other single location, including my own home.
I want to tell you about the nursing first because the nursing is the thing that makes the rest of the story possible.
Not as a profession.
As a character.
What nursing does to a person.
How it shapes you.
Fourteen years of night shifts, of being the person in the room when the moment is critical, of absorbing information and making decisions and then absorbing more information and making better decisions, of caring for people at the specific worst moments of their lives and being required to stay clear and present and useful throughout.
What nursing gives you is this: you learn to see clearly under pressure.
You learn that panic is the enemy of action.
You learn that the most important thing you can do when something is very wrong is to stay very still on the outside while your mind moves very fast on the inside.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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