From my nsfw account just for identity reasons.

Preface: This is a doozey, a diatribe. It is filled with rage and such a concentrated sadness that if you are at all sensitive to emotional upset, please just keep scrolling. I do not censor myself, these all unfiltered thoughts. I'm writing this preface actually only having finished the post and reading how intense it gets. I do not want individual nurses reading this to feel personally attacked. I want you to know that I tried. For SIX years I tried.

I tried unionizing my last hospital. We're in GA so it's hard; many of the nurses are middle class white women with dual income homes and very little class consciousness. They don't want to rock the boat. It's sad, but whatever.

I get fired, fine, start a new job at a shitty corpo hospital like a mile away from my house. I'm ready to start biking to work, trying to look at nursing with a more healthy mentality. All the while, American healthcare remains the fetid dumpster fire it's always been, thanks specifically to our unique brand of sado-capitalism.

8 weeks into the job, I walk out of an annoying patients room and I make a dark joke to another nurse. "I'm gonna shoot myself bc of this guy." Paraphrasing, the room was one of the week's well-known "You have my condolences" rooms; it was no question I was fucking joking.

Nurse even asks if I'm alright, I say "Oh yeah, just trying to lighten things up for myself, he's just being annoying about dietary stuff." Patient had told me his requirements were "My food has to have lived, to have died." I grew up in an Eastern religion but I wasn't fucking dealing with that one. Lol

That should have been the end of it.

My charge comes up, asks about it. I explain the same shit to her. Then to the Director of Nursing and the Chaplain (who tries to sympathize with my military background, but fuck him he has no idea what Afghanistan was like or what it means to me just bc his son offed himself in basic training like a ...whooosah I digress).

Lastly, everyone smiling, I'm asked to just talk to a doctor. I say "Sure, fine, I get it, but I also got noon medpass coming up and a couple patients not SATing well and one who needs significant dressing changes (I'm helping another nurse with that on top of my SIX)."

They walk with me to ED and just as I fucking expected, straight to their god damn psycho person room. I swear to god this country is so full of fucking cowards; it's never the people who have actually seen the shit that are taking precautions, but everyone who's trying to save their own asses from getting in trouble.

I sit down on the psycho person bed and wait for the ER doc to come in.

He eventually does and looks at me (I'm still in scrubs with my stethy over my neck looking like one hell of a psycho killer) and he says "What did ya say?"

I give him the two second run down and calmly explain "I've got no history, no SI/ST, just as I've reported to everyone else, I do need to get back to the floor, I've got 6 patients waiting for me."

And this pathetic excuse for a fucking doctor says, "Well I'm gonna have to 1013 you."

I'm shaking just trying to type this up. The next 5 days are horrifying. Not just for me, but for my WIFE (who they did NOT contact and they specifically noted that in my chart), my kids (who have no idea where the fuck their primary caregiver is for days on end), etc.

I'm nervously shitting and throwing up constantly, with no medical treatment. After being told multiple times "the next doc will be the one to clear you", I'm eventually "evaluated" by a tele-psych doctor for FOUR minutes at 2330 at night, who decides "Yeah this guy has to be made in patient".

I can't even type out the rest. That was all within the first 24 hrs. It gets worse and then I spend the rest of the 4 days in a lock down unit in the most pathetically depressing town in GA with homeless ppl and ppl who can't afford their meds long term.

I've been exposed to these places before, but as a patient, the experience is as EYE OPENING as it is TRAUMATIZING.

I have fucking fits of rage and emotional distress about it. Just the other day I had to STOP cooking dinner for my family so I could sit and call a nurse friend to talk through it with me because I was so awash with SHAME and HATE and RAGE, that I wanted to shatter all the windows in my fucking house.

I can no longer reconcile a profession (doctors too, you sick fucks who take your wads of cash and whore yourselves to the corps that run this meat grinder) that is built on a foundation of HEALING with a system that is DESIGNED to HURT people if that's what makes money.

It is PREDATORY. It is EVIL.

I don't want to hear any defenses of this system. There aren't any.

This system churns out just enough happy, living cancer-free 7 year olds to get you collaborators (whomever you may be reading this) to ignore the constant stream of shattered, broken dead and dying it creates and dumps out of the back alleyway.

Turns out the sanest man in American healthcare was John Q.

I'm more than happy to answer questions, I'm coming down from a fit over this. There's plenty of details I haven't shared. I was beaten during the ER stay. I was verbally abused. I was condescended to by people who claimed military backgrounds but clearly had no real relevant traumatic experiences to go off of.

But I certainly saw myself through the looking glass as the System Otherized me and stripped me of all sense of safety, care, healing, compassion, even my very humanity.

At one critical moment I thought "If I were a black man or women, this is the part where I would very likely die."

I cannot do this. I cannot be a part of this insane machine of dispossessed souls literally carving each other to pieces to feed the wallets of people with MBA's (your average DoN probably has one and still thinks she's a valuable member of society).

I worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a clinic nurse in a detention center. I was a machine gunner in Afghanistan. I've done trauma ICU.

I have been MOLDED by those experiences, but none of them prepared me for what happened in that ER.

If you think you understand your patients, I assure you... you. Are. WRONG. Not until you've been at the mercy of the system and been FAILED by it can you possibly understand this. That has become my conviction.

The retirement contributions aren't worth it anyway. Average will net you maybe 10-15% of your estimated retirement needs unless you're already over 45.

Good luck, nurses. Good fucking luck.

I'm so fucking tired. I really hope things can be made to change. But I know they won't without a modicum of violence, be it the fiscal/economic violence of striking and unions, the material violence of Americans continuing to be maimed and killed by this system, or the physical violence of CEO's being beaten to a pulp in their posh gated driveways (the key is to get em at the rooftop helipad and throw em off into the parking lot).