Do any other nurses think the job has made them horrible people?

[Reallydontcare]

I came into nursing for the right reasons, to make a difference, blah blah blah.

Fast forward 8 years, and I hate people. Everyone. I don't care one bit about the patients I'm looking after. On my ward it's not unusual for patients to stay several weeks; if someone dies it does not bother me in the slightest.

I do my job, and I try to do it well. But it's all an act (I'm a bloody good actress). The moment I hand over to the next shift, I switch off. I read all the sickly sweet inspirational quotes people post about nursing and I laugh. I don't stay late. I make sure I take my full break because I don't get paid for it. I don't think about patients when I've finished my shift. I do not go the extra mile. I just don't care.

When I see disasters/atrocities on TV where hundreds of lives are lost, it doesn't bother me one bit. I just have no feelings whatsoever. The job has made me a horrible, horrible person.

Obviously the answer would be to leave and find a new career. But I'm single with a mortgage to pay, so retraining for something else is not an option.

Bearing in mind this is anonymous, does anyone else feel the same?

Nurse of 20 odd years working in a fairly high pressure area - critical care. I’ve noticed that many colleagues are on the whole level lovely to patients and go the extra mile but they’re bloody awful to their fellow nurses. Not sure whether it’s an ICU thing but the level of bitchiness and just general nastiness is astounding - like the school playground unfortunately.

I am surprised you think this is abnormal. I teach uni students and they often come to me, as their tutor, with their problems, feeling anxious, stressed, sometimes suicidal. Or I might help them over several months with a dissertation. Do I think about them when I leave at night? Nope. I am pleased if they do well and usually turn up to graduation as a professional courtesy. But I am not emotionally invested in them in any way.

One of my close relatives has nurses in for care. I don't want them to think about them when they leave, I want them to do a good professional job when they are there. Of course you have to act a bit sometimes, but I don't think that necessarily means you are burnt out.

Your stress levels are too high and it's a good idea to move to another area of nursing or out for this reason, but not blubbling over patients is quite normal I think in the care/nursing/dr sector as you really couldn't be grieving genuinely every time one died. Some might, but it's not obligatory at all and can be bad for your health to care too much.

I have been nursing 38 years and still care about my patients and their relatives.
But I have only been upset by a small percentage of those that died.I am more upset by the pressure on the service that compresses my time with a patient because if I spend the time you need then someone else gets no help at all.
The job is not the same as it was.
Dealing with the emotional aspects has to be learnt and dealt with.The problem is you can't know if you can do that until you've been in the job for years and the years may break you as OP is finding out.
The work is with sicker patients,faster throughput and less of us.
I've been a patient and when you're in pain time is long.Nut if there are 2trained nurses on the ward doing all the drugs,IVs and pain killers only a few people with be at the top of the list,more nurses with more time is the answer but a lot of us are retiring,fewer taking our place,fewer staying because of the stress and because the service is family unfriendly and 25% of training nurses top out.Until any of this is addressed it won't get any better.

I've been over the last 30 years an air hostess, a nurse, a prison warden (mens prison) and a podiatrist.
The absolute worse job out of the lot was air hostess.
I did 6 months and thought fuck that....went back to nursing for a rest.

I've been a learning disability nurse for 30 years and totally fed up with the violence and aggression. I feel I need out.

Thank you for saying what many think. You are brave and truthful. It takes integrity to speak this way. It's time to take care of yourself. Nursing is hard and sometimes damaging to the human spirit. The requirement to self sacrifice and always love everyone drains you if your own cup isn't being filled up. High acuity and high flow environments with little time for developing a relationship with your patients make it difficult to feel anything but pressure . The list of things to do and document make the tasks the focus instead of you and your patients. Find someone you can sit and have a counselling relationship with.They may help you change job or direction and find your joy .Some patients behave badly, some are hard to look after too. Not all nurses are angels to work with either !

It is a bit depressing when you read that a solution to soul-destroying, mental heath damaging frontline, coal-face NHS HCP work is to go into management.

They are very often the cause of the damage.

They are on their third Chardonnay while you are one your 10th understaffed, overworked hour.

They. Do. Not. Care.

Mine tells me to 'look to the positives', to accept 'it is what it is'..... and if you need me, I'm only a phone call (and 25 miles) away.

May I approach this from a different angle?

I noticed you wrote that your single and paying the mortgage so feel can’t leave, how is your life outside of “ the job”? Do you have a “ good life”? Hobbies, friends, things to look forward to?
I only ask as I’ve been in similar position myself when I recovering from divorce, lone parenting , paying all the bills, everything fell to me.Money was tight so couldn’t do many things that relieve stress for most people outside of work.I work front line in London and because I mostly deal with “ the baddies” , shift work,very little breaks , always having to be hyper viligant was burn out, I felt exactly as you describe.i hated people, used to get home shut the door and want nothing to do with the world.

Eventually after a few years I met my dp , started to create a life for living again ( although we have our very rocky moments, believe me) but I can see and feel the good again in life.Even the little things.Now I don’t believe you need a partner to do this at all, sometimes we just need a leg up to feel better again, be it from a friend, pet, hobby etc .could you make your life away from the job any better so in the end you view the job as a means to an end but start to get a little satisfaction from it at all? Factor in some good downtime for yourself? It could be your slightly depressed too and not realise?
HTH ?

Thecrown3 that's a really thoughtful post. Rings true for me, anyway.

Thanks @nearly50. I hope it helps the op see a different view of where they could focus

@Thecrown3 Wow, you have completely hit the nail on the head. I've been withdrawing from the world and life in general more and more, not getting out of bed on my days off, rarely leaving the house... It all culminated in me having a breakdown at work yesterday, sobbing on my (very understanding) manager, before being sent home. Seems like I have some urgent work to do on my mental health.

reallydontcare poor you, it sounds like the stress of the workplace has tipped you into a depression. Judging by this thread, you are not the only nurse in this position. I hope you get some help from the GP and your managers and perhaps a change of job eventually is the way forward- the pressure on these wards sounds unbearable. Keep posting if it helps.

I thought so.... unfortunately... reading between lines :-( been there got t shirt unfortunately.
Use these days off for the moment to be kind to yourself, eat, sleep or rest.maybe do a little mind mapping of what you need your life to look like after this moment.

Sounds like classic burnout, I've been nursing for 27 years and have felt the way you are feeling in certain jobs and at various times was looking to do anything else other than nursing.
I can honestly say I love my job now which is community mental health nursing, I have great colleagues and work in a rural area which is very beautiful.
Maybe look for work in a different area of nursing, look into something not on the coal face like research or teaching. What helped reignite my love for my job was doing a job completely out of my comfort zone where I had to learn on the job.
See if there are any courses for Occupational health, Health Visiting, Sexual Health nurse. There are so many different types of work that hopefully you don't need to leave nursing altogether.

Compassion fatigue is extremely common in medical professionals.

reallydontcare you having a breakdown at work and sobbing on your manager sounds exactly like me. (I am also lucky enough to have a very supportive manager without whom I wouldn't have got through the past year) I am also a nurse, who has been working on a ward for over 10 years.
When I read your OP, I thought it sounded like burnout. This is after I spent a lot of time, reading about burnout (mostly in an attempt to disagree with my manager when she suggested that was what was wrong with me! I haven't managed to persuade her that she is wrong).
I didn't experience it exactly the same as you, I don't tend to feel like I don't care about my patients, but perhaps it is mentally healthier to have that as a protective factor rather than trying to care too much about all of them. But I did end up not coping, crying at work, diagnosed myself with anxiety.
Unfortunately, I don't have any good advice about what to do about it though, because I have spent most of the past 10 months refusing to accept that I am burnt out and not coping. On my bad days I insist to my manager that things will just get better by themselves (she doesn't believe me). She tries to persuade me to take time off sick but I refuse. However, take my advice because I'm not using it! Ring in sick, see your GP, does your Trust have a staff counselling service? or can your GP refer you to someone? Consider looking into a different job as others have suggested though it is hard to do that when you feel so beaten down by the job you have.
Hope you find something that helps and you feel better soon.

I had this as a hca, after 5 years I just didn't care anymore, I left and I am glad I did

I'm a nurse too, and understand a lot of what you're saying. Maybe try something like theatres, outpatients or A&E, where you only see patients for a short time, then move on to the next. The thing about ward work, and certainly some wards like stroke, you're seeing the same patients day in, day out so can be hard

If I am right in thinking that on day one on the wards you did care then it sounds like you are burnt out and blocking upsetting stuff from getting to you by going to the opposite extreme of not giving a monkey's.

I did acute full on NHS (intensive care, HDU etc) for 20 years and I saw little bits of what you describe in me. In the end I got out because I was bored of it, (that and staff shortage) and figured I could n't give my best anymore but I still felt something for people.

OP I am sure you have many skills to transfer somewhere else, the best of luck.

I agree you should try to find a secondment in another area such as community nursing. These posts come up frequently when people go on mat leave or career breaks - see if this makes any difference to how you feel about the job. I understand where you’re coming from, patients now often have so much more complex medical conditions to manage due to advances in medicines most of current caseload would have died within a couple of years after diagnosis when I started working 25 years ago nowadays they will survive +10 years but needing a huge amount of medical and social care which stresses them and everyone else out especially when their quality of life often isn’t great for the input. This in turn makes patients more demanding of your time, energy and patience until you feel you can’t give anymore and then stop feeling anything in order to protect their own mental health. Most of my colleagues feel like this to varying degrees and a lot are planning to get out of the NHS as soon as possible because of the belief this will just get worse

OP also do make sure you put yourself first as I learnt the hard way that your mental health is really important.
Don't return to work until you're really ready.