Nurture21

This year I left my job, a job I was really good at, a job I did a lot of good in, a job (for the most part) I really loved. Its a strange thing when something you love becomes the enemy. When your tolerance to the things that ordinarily you'd push through professionally become too unbearable to deal with.  If you've read my blog post 'Hospice nursing in a pandemic' you will have some insight into the in's and out's of the professional issues I and my former colleagues had being facing during  the first six months of the Pandemic.  For me though, the 'push' to fight on became too much. Made redundant in September 2020 and re-deployed into a job I didn't enjoy anywhere near as much within the organisation, my enthusiasm, vision, and loyalty gradually drained from me as work became a barren place to be and life outside had very little to offer to distract my soul from the daily socialisation with death.  You see when your job is to focus on death and d...

  March - September 2020 March - My family and I were self-isolating, my daughter had a sore throat and high temperature. Coronavirus was taking hold in our nation. My job as a palliative care staff nurse about to change forever.  In the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic, things happened quickly. Government guidelines changed daily, managers in all health organisations struggled to keep up with the daily changes, information was disseminated as soon as it was digested but it was fast paced and ever changing. The aim to protect both patients and staff became priority. It seems strange now, but at that point wearing face masks was not an expectation unless a patient was showing symptoms of a high temperature or cough – that soon changed of course. But those first two weeks meant that the virus took it's opportunity and spread quickly through staff members and some patients. This wasn’t to last though; we caught up, we cleaned, swabbed, isolated and became a Covid free H...

2008 was a bitter sweet year for me. It was the year I became a Mum and it was the year I lost my own Mum. My Mum missed meeting my daughter by five and a half weeks. I think we both kind of knew that it was never meant to be, but it remained a deep unspoken truth that hurt too much to voice. It was a remarkable thing really. My whole pregnancy was littered with poignant moments that seemed to tie my mum and my daughter together before she'd even entered the world. I remember an occasion when I was four months pregnant at my parents house; I was being sick in one bathroom due to my progressing pregnancy and my Mum was in a bathroom across the landing being sick due to her progressing cancer. The circle of life never more magnified than at that moment. My nine months of pregnancy mirrored nine months of deterioration in my Mum's health. During the last few hours of my Mum's life I sat next to her bed and placed her hand on my huge pregnant tummy. I watched the colour gradual...