Life as an Emergency Nurse

By Karla Rodriguez

Evyn Box, an emergency nurse at the University Medical Center in Lubbock, remembers the first time a case hit close to home. She watched as an Iraq veteran experiencing an active flashback was taken to a psych room.

umcems“My husband is an Iraq veteran,” Box said. “He has PTSD, so hearing this man talking—and very descriptively talking out this flashback—I just lost it at the nurses’ station.”

Emergency nurses often face high levels of stress, and more than half experience at least some symptoms of “compassion fatigue,” also called “secondary traumatic stress.”

“A lot of times, if you are on the outside versus being on the inside of it, we can come off as callous and uncaring.”

Box and two of her colleagues shared their insights with a reporter for The Hub@TTU on the occasion of National Emergency Nurses Day last week. The holiday is observed on the second Wednesday in October every year.

Emergency nurses are a different breed of people, said Nicolle Apel, an assistant director for nurses at UMC.

“A lot of times, if you are on the outside versus being on the inside of it, we can come off as callous and uncaring,” she said. “And that’s really not the truth. We use humor and sometimes dark humor to help us deal with what we deal with every day.”

She added: “Sometimes you kind of have to step back and remind yourself that God is in control of a patient. There are some people that you just cannot save, but we feel like it’s our failure if we don’t.”

For Cheryl Morrison, a trauma nurse at UMC, the hardest cases are those involving children.

“We knew drunk drivers’ [cases], where kids get hurt, or abuse cases that stick out in your mind for years,” Morrison said.

Everyone in the hospital is close and like family, she said, so they talk about and cope with traumatic situations together.

“Some things will never ever go out of  your head,” Morrison said. “Some things are there forever, but for the most part, we get through it.”

Apel said critical incident management is a process used to start the coping strategies immediately, ensuring nurses are okay and not bottling things up.

“That really leads to burn out, and you can come to just hate nursing because you’ve never been able to deal with what you’ve seen,” she said. “And sometimes the things we see are just, I mean, you have dreams about them.”

She added: “My kids call me the fun sucker because they’re not allowed to do anything hardly without me hovering over them. They kind of expect that, but you have to deal with it and realize that not every single thing that happens is going to happen to you or your children.”

“I was just created, I think, to do some of my best work under the most chaotic conditions.”

With a smart rating of 89, UMC is the highest rated hospital in the city, according to HealthGrove, a health and medical resource website.

Box said some of her best nights are when traumas are coming in one after another because she gets fired up.

“I mean, that’s what gets me going,” Box said. “I was just created, I think, to do some of my best work under the most chaotic conditions. A lot of us are here because we’re geared towards acting, and we want to be moving and doing things and helping. If we’re just sitting there, we start to worry.”

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