I’m a nurse, I work in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been a nurse for about 15 years now and when I first got into the medical field, I thought I’d be taking care of people maybe at the end of a long natural life span when they’re very old, or maybe some very unfortunate young people who suffer from unexpected illnesses. Then, you figure, some tragic accidents, you know? You’ll always have people falling off ladders or bicycles and even in the most perfect utopian society we can envision there are always going to be some people whose bodies need some help and as a nurse, I’ll be there to help them. And I thought, how rewarding this career will be, to genuinely be able to help people every day.
But then you get into medicine and you see, overwhelmingly your patients aren’t the very old or the victims of tragically unavoidable accidents and illness. More and more, the people filling hospital beds are there because our current system has failed them so thoroughly that they can’t even maintain their physical bodies without medical intervention.
Right now, in America we live in an incredibly productive and wealth-generating time in history but regular people are getting left behind and unable to even meet their basic needs. So we end up with hospitals full of patients who are there because they lack access to nutritious food, or adequate shelter. We get patients who come in suffering from “exposure” when it’s too hot or cold, or trench foot when it rains and they can’t get their feet dry.
Even for housed, employed people, the cost of dental care is so unattainable that we end up with hospitalized patients suffering from abscesses and airway compromise. As more just regular, working people, who maybe just a generation prior came from middle-class families, are now left behind, and pushed into the margins and left with no path to any kind of stable life for themselves and their families, you end up with a destabilization of the whole community, and I see this in the hospital as well: more violence, more addiction, more lives cut short in ways they never should have been.
As a nurse, to take care of all these patients every day, you just are left with a sense of the deep injustice at work here. And how if we were in a properly functioning society that actually worked to lift everyone up, so many of my patients would be out living healthy happy lives instead of just literally trying to survive in a hospital bed.
I got into nursing because I wanted to help people, and it’s heartbreaking to go to work every day and know that the help my patients really need isn’t something I can deliver in their hospital bed, it needs to come from a total restructuring of our society in order to build healthy, stable communities.
