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...

It's been notoriously hard this last year . 'Unprecedented' is perhaps one of the most frequently used words of this time. Circumstances that none of us saw, none of us anticipated, none of us wanted. This mind blowing disruption has thrown itself at our feet like shattered glass from a car crash. We all feel bruised, we all feel weary, we have all had enough. The pull to get back to seeing people we love, doing the things we love and just being 'normal' is enormous and we all feel it, we all need it. We all grieve that which we have lost and it can be argued, 'we' will never be the same people again.  But what about our children? This generation of brilliant people who have had to adapt this year perhaps more than any other group of people. For children growing up in these times it has been a unique, challenging and difficult experience. Our children have had to learn and grow up in ways no other generation has ever had to. We have asked so much of them and...

  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...