Being resilient was a disadvantage for us. That’s the part nobody tells you when they praise a nurse for her strength - resilience does not protect you. It becomes the reason they ask for more. Instead of one job, I’m holding six. Some shifts, seven or more.
When AI first showed up on our units, it was brilliant, and I was proud to be part of it. It flagged sepsis before we would caught it ourselves - a fever of 101, a respiratory rate climbing past twenty, a bloop pressure sliding the wrong way, and the computer would light up before I’d even finished my rounds. On the monitors, it caught rhythms turning irregular, an ST segment lifting or dropping, the first signs of a heart attack no one in the room had noticed yet. All of it meant fewer complications, faster treatment, patients who got to walk out instead of coding on us. I believed it was going to make our load lighter.
On one hand, it did. On the other, it gave the system room to add more.
That’s the part I want to be precise about, because it isn’t AI’s fault. AI didn’t decide I should also be the secretary, the monitor tech, the housekeeping staff, the respiratory tech, the patient advocate, and the phlebotomist , all inside one twelve-hour shift. People decided that. The efficiency AI bought us didn’t get handed back to us as room to breathe - it got quickly absorbed as more room to fill. We got faster, so they asked for more. We got more resilient, so they asked for more still. Burnout is the word everyone reaches for, but burnout makes it sound like something that happens to a body on its own, the way weather happens. It isn’t weather. It’s a decision, made by someone who isn’t standing at the bedside, about how much one person can be asked to carry before she breaks.
And we are taught to be resilient in critical moments. So when they push a little more to accommodate a little more, we stretch. We are good at stretching. We stretch until one day - it might take days, months, years, it’s different for everyone - you realize you don’t have anything left to give. That’s the day nurses leave the bedside. Not because they stopped caring. Because the caring finally ran out of room to live in them.
Nurses are healers. We were taught skills to heal, with a heart full of gold and the strive to do better. When the passion dies slowly, because the system swallowed it instead of nurturing it, we have no choice but to go looking for another home - somewhere that can hold us the way we hold our patients. Somewhere that notices when we’re running on empty before we do, the way our monitors are trained to catch a heart before it stops.
If we find a place like that, that’s where we’ll stay.
Missing?
A home for the nurses.
The reward?
Unconditional love.