Categories: nursing
Tags: sad, health visiting
Date: 15 December 2005 12:31:17
When you work in a caring profession (as I did, till recently) you find you develop all sorts of coping mechanisms for dealing with the crap that you get faced with. And even though, as nursing jobs go, health visiting could be seen as pretty mild (by and large it's not life and death, although sometimes it was) there are still families and individuals who work their way under your defence mechanisms. And even when you're losing sleep worrying about a sick child, or a depressed mum, or a family facing deportation, or whatever, you convince yourself that you're not getting emotionally involved, that you're maintaining a professional distance, that life goes on.
Bollocks.
I chatted yesterday with the guy who worked with me in Lewisham, the other health visitor, for the first time since I left. We both felt bad about leaving it so long, but it was good for me as I've actually been missing the job a lot and I think it would have made me more homesick to have talked with him before. Of course we were both in stitches for most of the conversation - we always got on well and had such a laugh, and yesterday we just picked up where we left off - but there was one family, more than any other, that I knew I would have to ask about, that I cared too much about to not ask about. He knew that too, and told me about them before I asked (and told me that he had originally decided not to tell me, but knew that he should), and told me that what we all knew would be the inevitable outcome for that family right from the start had happened. And even though it was the inevitable outcome, and it's no surprise, I'm still devastated. I never lost hope for them, but they've lost it now.
My involvement with that family I think is the one thing that I'm most proud of in my health visiting career. I grew as a person, as a professional, as a member of the local community, through that encounter. It taught me about people's capacity to learn and love, and taught me about my own strengths and weaknesses in facilitating that capacity in others. God, I'm in bits about this. Please pray, if that's your thing, especially for T. I hate this, I wish it was more simple to be more emotionally detached. But I guess life's just not that simple, eh?