My name is Kristin, and if you’re new here,
thanks for joiningI just wanted to let you know I’ll be taking one of my breaks from Substack for as long as necessary. I have enjoyed the last few weeks here tremendously! I’ve met some great new friends and I’m thrilled every time someone takes the time to share or leave a comment on one of my stories. The recent mentions from some of my favorite authors have sent me over the moon. I will always remember how good this moment feels and thank you for that.
Hmm? I love how AI concocts the above image when I enter, nurse with dark brown hair and messy bun, flying over the moon, into the criteria bar. Apparently the quintessential Nurse has Barbie proportions. Perhaps the phrase, 36-24-36 only if she’s 5’3” makes more sense to you.
Your preference for whichever reference makes absolutely no difference to me.
I’m a lifelong learner. I consider myself a student of life, an avid lover of any music and every book, humans and love, and I love all the love languages. Although I took French for years, I speak only enough conversational Spanish to perform a rudimentary nursing assessment. Each and every day I speak with the humans of the world, especially the comatose ones, who hear me loud and clear, but are unable to talk back. At least not with their words.
Basically I speak in a lot of tongues to get my job done. Frankly I am Glinda The Motherfucking Good Witch when it comes to speaking in a manner that does not upset or offend the masses. This personality shift occurs the moment I don my wooden clogs and set foot inside of the hospital. I would never want to upset, offend or further betray, the trust of all the people, who now truly have a multitude read: laundry list, of good goddamn reasons, to fear being a patient in the hospital.
It’s like putting on a costume and going to a show.
Look at her! She’s Wicked!
Each and every day I flirt, I crack jokes, I digress, I cater, educate, grovel, beg, plead and apologize. All for the greater good and in the effort to somehow help you all feel better about being in the Intensive Care Unit. In fact I remember being terrified the first time I set foot there in my Converse sneakers. I was 19 and watched Nanny Shirley’s terrified eyes widen and her mouth gasp for air as she tried, but failed, to ride and breathe along with the ventilator. I would like to speak to the ICU nurse who did not properly sedate my grandmother and left her scared, alone and tied to the bed. It was so horrifying I did not enter her hospital room and I blocked the whole experience from my mind until this very moment. Also Nanny Shirley was a patient in the same hospital at the same time, where the Angel of Death Nurse Charles Cullen went on one of his serial killing sprees. I met a woman who went to nursing school with him, she said he was really very nice and also very quiet.
Nanny Shirley always said the quiet ones are the ones you have to watch out for. No Charles Cullen was not one of her nurses and if he was I would not be here. I would maybe be thinking about lobbying for the return of the death penalty. Except I think that move could potentially bite a few innocent New Jersey healthcare workers in the ass. I doubt I’m one of them, but this world has gone quite mad. Just know that Charles Cullen is much safer in jail. Maybe not though because prisoners usually love nurses.
Personally, I feel I owe it to all of you to help rebuild the trust that Nurses and Patients have shared for centuries. You all owe me nothing. I would like to thank the many citizens of the world who took the internet stage and uttered the words—
You signed up for this.
You know during those early pandemic days. It was so nice to be reminded that I didn’t sign up for shit and could walk away. I didn’t, and I didn’t stay for you either. I stayed to feed, clothe and house my children. Thanks though for silencing the countless healthcare workers who bravely risked their lives and their jobs when they had the courage to come forward and speak out about the atrocities they witnessed in the American hospitals they worked in.
For reasons I will not be explaining here, and unless you’ve seen the light, if you are one who posted that statement, I hope you rot in hell. Look up how many healthcare workers have committed suicide since 2020 and come back and tell me again how we, the non-government and pension-less employees of this country, signed up for that?
If you happened to jack up the price of your personal arsenal of masks and hand sanitizer, you can also rot in hell.
Look up how many nurses walked away, last I checked it was over a 100,000, but please keep complaining about your ED wait times.
Here’s the truth. It was strictly survival of the fucking fittest and so for now you’re stuck with me and nurses like me. Many of the once sensitivity trained nurses from the Class of 2020 have already left. Don’t worry too much, many of them are now your Nurse Practitioners and Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists.
Smile Bitches. Are you happy now? I’m not, they’re all a hell of a lot smarter than I am. At this stage of the game I would make less money as an NP and I like to talk to my patients so that rules out Nurse Anesthesia school for me.
The truth is I don’t like artificial things at all and social media tops this list of mine. I prefer the good old days when you would have had to look me in the eye and utter those words to my blank and lifeless face. Trust me you would be in desperate need of an ambulance if you had the audacity to say something like that to my face in March, April or May of 2020.
It’s ironic that I sit and write these words as a woman with breast implants and Botox in her face. The Botox mostly hides the scar I received when I was thrown from the back of a motorcycle by a man wearing a shirt that said,
If you can read this, the bitch fell off the back.
Again, come say it to my face. Please share your opinion about what I did or did not sign up for. I will never be afraid of any of your carelessly hurled words. That’s me I’m just not a sensitive kind of girl.
I’m feral, just like most GenX children, and I’m also a Capricorn. I am unafraid of death. Thanks also to the pandemic, I’m unafraid to lose my home, my children, my job and even my love for my chosen profession. I managed to live without so many things I love for a lot of the last four years.
My only remaining fear in this post-pandemic digital shit show is your IGNORANCE and unwillingness to SHUT UP and LEARN.
Can the folks who like to type with ALL CAPS ON hear me?
I watch and marvel how you all fight here, preach only to your own choirs and sway not one single vote. Always I wonder if your families and friends don’t speak to you anymore, as a result of all this passionate enthusiasm you share and spew. All the things you say to them online, but probably not to their faces. Maybe like me you don’t articulate yourself as well when you’re upset and try to open your mouth, but the words won’t come out. I like to write just like you. I also spot your loneliness a mile away and don’t worry I see myself clearly.
I’ll usually confirm my suspicions on your deathbeds. By the way, they’ll show up for you and tell me how stupid the whole thing was. How they hope and pray that you someday wake up from your coma and return to earth so they can tell you how much they love you!
If my memory serves me correctly, ignorance is pure bliss.
Don’t think for a second I didn’t screech at my own father, or become absolutely hysterical, when he told me he thought it was all a hoax. In the words of Eminem, I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like. My father knows me better than any man on this planet. I was 44 when I cried and begged him to listen to me in the most childish way possible. He took me at my word and we never fought about it again.
I know you don’t know me. I don’t need you to agree with me or even like me at all. Please know I sit here and read every last one of your stories with an open mind.
I want, no that’s not it, I need, to hear your stories. New Jersey is not South Dakota or Montana or Colorado or where-fucking-ever. The Nurse knows your life experiences are all different from mine.
I’m partly stepping back for a moment because I strongly suspect I am being cyber stalked and tormented by one of my former boyfriends here on Substack. Again the emphasis is on the word boy. Maybe I am out of my mind, I can’t ever really be sure, but the worst part about feeling this familiar feeling so many years later, is the way in which it isolates me. It makes me feel so alone and it prevents me from speaking out. That’s the whole point of bullying though and I refuse to live in shame, fear, self-doubt or silence. Especially when my only crime in the relationship was walking away when he ended our relationship in a brief phone call.
I sometimes wish I had a victim mentality, but I do not. I guess some men are just used to women who throw themselves on the floor and make a big fuss in the event of a breakup. Not me, it was a great year until it wasn’t. It always is.
Nope I don’t have a victim mentality and I doubt I ever will. I know I’m an absolute fucking force to be reckoned with. I make no excuses and will never again choose to be chemically sedated for being sometimes moody. I will just continue to smoke cigarettes.
I will always quickly apologize for the way I said something, but I will never apologize for my passion.
Leave me alone. Goodbye.
I’ll leave you with this final pandemic vignette. *In August of 2020, I dropped my oldest daughter off for her freshman year of college. Together we took a mostly empty 5 hour train ride from New Jersey to Massachusetts. That’s because I spent the better part of the last twenty years of my life terrified of driving down the street, on a highway or over a tall bridge. I lived in constant fear of being T-Boned by someone driving and texting. Worried I would be hit head on by someone who is not yet aware they are a diabetic or about to suffer their first seizure. I was afraid of every drunk, high and distracted driver, especially the ones who think they are smarter than the rest of us.
There is a hefty toll to pay for working as a Trauma ICU Nurse for all these years.
I was prohibited from entering the dorm. We were required to box and ship her belongings ahead of time. It all felt so out of control and I hated the thought of my little girl unpacking and organizing her stuff by herself. According to all of her elementary school teachers, she never once managed to keep her school supplies neat and tidy. I knew it because her bedroom used to always look like a bomb went off in it. The heartless bitch at the welcome table whooshed her away to get a Covid test. She would have to take three negative tests before she was allowed to leave her room. For the next week, her meals were going to be delivered to her dorm door, as if she were locked in solitary confinement.
The following parting words I spoke were unscripted and ripped straight from my soul.
“Listen to me very carefully,” I said as I gripped her pale face with my shaking hands and stared at her—
“If you even think you have Covid, I will be here in 5 hours.”
Don’t ask, don’t tell, fuck all who said I signed up for this.
Now you listen to me very carefully. I would never, ever have let my child set foot in an American hospital in the year 2020.
That’s how bad it was.
I’d call that biker and go get my fucking kid.
Remember I wrote recently I felt upset and irritated.. Well now I’m mad.
To know me is to love me. Anyone who knows me and has ever worked with me knows one thing about me and that is:
The only direction I ever move is FORWARD.
PS. I love to drive now and know to let the road take me, wherever it leads. Let’s fucking go.
*Edited 9/15/24
Sorry you have to deal with this kind of crap. Unfortunately it always happens to the good people and the scum skate away untarnished. Kind of an editorial on life today in general. I know you’re tougher than nails and you’ll drive thru and be back stronger (if that’s even possible with you) and definitely better. You’re definitely one of a kind. I know I’ll miss you here, I love to read your stuff.
Maybe not goodbye with the good, that’s too final. Maybe more like so long (for now).
Love your honesty and fearlessness, Kristin! I believe every bit of the hospital hell you went through/dealt with! I’m sorry you have to beware a bully/stalker… wise if you to step away and put self care first! You are our strong, brave, caring warrior and I wish you safety and peace, sweet friend! I’m so glad to find you here and hope you return when time is right! Much love and admiration for you! ❤️🥰🤗💕