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🌻With Katrina Brown
🩺 Registered Nurse for 17 years
🤲🏻 Now healing the healers with Ayurveda, sound baths + aromatherapy 🌿🎶
⬇️ Links below for sound baths + events 🩷

19/06/2026

Day 20 - Missing picking your kids up from school 😔

This one almost got me upset just thinking about it 🥺

My daughter was not naturally conceived, and after successfully falling pregnant from the one and only embryo we created, she holds a pretty special place in my heart 🫶🏻

Therefore, I like to be there for her.

For all of her special moments.

Unfortunately, nursing doesn't always make that easy.

I still remember her very first day at daycare. It was a new job, and I didn't want to disappoint my new manager by asking for time off.

So I went to work.

And to this day, I have no idea what her little face looked like when she was picked up that afternoon.

Was she excited?

Nervous?

Confused?

Relieved?

I don't know.

And that's a moment I'll never get back.

As nurses, we miss school concerts, sports carnivals, Mother's Day stalls, assemblies, pickups, drop-offs, birthdays, and all sorts of little moments that other people take for granted.

Most of the time, we accept it as part of the job.

But every now and then, there's a moment that stings a little more than the rest.

For me, it was that first daycare pickup.

And if I had my time again, I'd take the afternoon off.

18/06/2026

Day 19 - Dealing with difficult patients and families 🤨

People don’t often choose to get sick, and they certainly don’t volunteer to get a chronic condition like diabetes or asthma.

But unfortunately, these illnesses can put patients in a position where medical help is necessary to keep them alive 🩺

Sometimes, the patient is in denial about their condition.

Sometimes, the family is in denial about the patient’s condition.

Either one of these situations can cause tension throughout the caregiving process, and unfortunately, nurses are often stuck in the middle.

Take the 11-year-old boy whose asthma is uncontrolled because he won’t take his preventer as prescribed 🫁

Or the 50-year-old man with a pressure sore on his lower leg because he has uncontrolled diabetes but won’t stop drinking soft drink and eating takeaway.

Or the European family who maintained a 24-hour presence at their mother’s bedside and demanded answers and attention every five minutes when she was admitted with a UTI (Urinary Tract Infection).

Or the husband with his pregnant wife in labour who’s stressed to the max 🤯

Sometimes, nurses are simply the nearest person for a patient or family member to take their frustration out on.

And while it’s easy to label someone as a ‘difficult patient’ or a ‘difficult family’, often what sits underneath is fear, stress, grief, denial, frustration, or a complete loss of control.

It’s one of the reasons nursing can be so emotionally exhausting 😩

You’re not just caring for the patient — you’re often caring for the people around them too.

17/06/2026

Day 18 - Being expected to do more with less 📋

It never ceases to amaze me how many new policies and procedures are implemented in health services by people who aren’t actually working on the floor to understand how nurses will find the time to complete them.

Nurses are inundated with paperwork already 🤯

Then something changes, and an additional form is created and rolled out across the health service, with a casual, “Oh yeah, can you fill out that new form too?”

Suddenly your quick Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is now a full-page questionnaire to assess a patient’s cognitive status (even though they’re only being admitted for less than 24 hours), and you’ve got three minutes until handover 🙄

Or in some desk-based roles, I’ve had to complete multiple KPI and data collection tasks after every patient I saw to generate statistics for grant applications, funding reports, and future research projects.

And in the research sector, the paperwork had to be completed meticulously, with every box checked and every section completed correctly, otherwise it would come back with a “Please complete” notice attached to it.

Don’t get me wrong — documentation is important. It protects patients, supports continuity of care, and provides a legal record of what happened.

But every extra form takes time away from something else.

Usually that “something else” is patient care.

Most nurses didn’t choose this profession because they dreamed of completing paperwork all day.

We became nurses to care for people, not to keep adding documents to an already overflowing to-do list.

16/06/2026

Day 17 - Lack of support from management 😣

I’ve been very lucky throughout my nursing career that most of my bosses have been supportive, inclusive, and created a culture where work felt more like a family home than a workplace 🤲🏻

However, I’ve also had a couple of shockers who were the complete opposite 😂

I remember being told by a particular nurse manager (who hadn’t even employed me yet, but I’d already been earmarked for a position) that she ‘ran the unit like a well-oiled machine’ and she didn’t want anyone or anything disturbing the flow.

That same manager later gave me an ultimatum and made me choose between keeping my job or going on a family holiday to the UK.

I took the holiday because YOLO! ✈️

Other unsupportive managers have expected me to complete tasks with little or no guidance (‘Just get stuck into it!’), asked me to work in unfamiliar clinical areas without appropriate orientation, or expected me to manage situations without the help I actually needed.

Being a good manager isn’t about being everyone’s friend.

It’s about making staff feel safe enough to ask questions, supported enough to learn, and confident enough to provide the best possible care for their patients.

A good manager can make people want to stay.

And let’s be honest, nursing is hard enough without feeling like you’re doing it all on your own.

Every nurse should feel like someone has their back 🤲🏻

15/06/2026

Day 16 - Unrealistic workloads 🤯

As a student nurse, I remember having shifts where I felt useless, superfluous, and like I was in the way. It’s hard to know how to help when the nurse you’re buddied up with has no time to teach, or even time to talk.

This wasn’t the nurse’s fault though — it was the demands of the job.

Patient loads. Complex wound dressings. Admissions. Discharges. Medication rounds. IV antibiotics. Observation rounds. Endless documentation. Students. Audits. Education sessions.

And that’s just a normal day.

It doesn’t account for the patient who deteriorates unexpectedly, the family member who needs extra support, the confused patient who keeps wandering, or the admission that arrives right before handover.

Even in my role as an Asthma Educator, there were weeks where I was so busy that I didn’t get a lunch break until 3.30pm (and if you know me well, you’ll know that I NEVER skip an opportunity to eat otherwise I become The Hangry Nurse 😤😂).

It’s that feeling of looking at your handover sheet, or your bookings calendar at the start of the day, releasing a big sigh, and thinking:

‘Holy s**t. There is absolutely no way I can get all of this done.’

But somehow, we show up, prioritise what we can, and do our best with the time we’re given.

Sometimes, that’s all we can do.

14/06/2026

Day 15 - Being responsible for too many patients 🫨

Let me take you back to Queensland, circa 2008.

I was on a working holiday and was based in Gladstone at the time. Most of my shifts were in emergency (which is funny because I never wanted to work in emergency at all, and yet a lot of my work whilst travelling was in ED! But that’s another story…), but this one particular morning I had agreed to work on the medical ward.

As a Registered Nurse, I was paired up with an Enrolled Nurse (EN), and between us we had 12 patients to look after.

I nearly fell off my chair when I heard how many people we had to care for!

I’d come from Victoria where the nurse-patient ratio was 1:4, not 2:12! 😮

Fortunately, the EN did most of the heavy lifting — all the showering, feeding, dressing, and normal activities of daily living (I can’t even remember who she was but she saved my bacon that day 🙏🏻).

Which left me being responsible for medication distribution, accompanying the doctors on their rounds, the odd wound dressing, writing notes, and doing handover to the next shift.

For 12 patients.

By the time it came time to write my notes, I was waaaayyyyy behind time, and I had no idea about so many things — did the patient go to the toilet? What’s their ambulatory status like? How much food had they eaten? Was their Fluid Balance Chart up to date? 🤯

It was overwhelming.

Looking back, I don’t think I provided the standard of care that I wanted to that day. Not because I didn’t care, and not because I wasn’t trying.

It was because there were simply too many patients and not enough time.

And that’s the thing about unsafe workloads — it’s not the nurses who suffer most.

It’s the patients.

What’s the highest number of patients you’ve been responsible for?

13/06/2026

Day 14 - Working a double shift 😵‍💫

“I’ll just stay back for four hours and help out…”

Famous last words.

With just 10 minutes to go until your four hours is up, you’re elbow deep in faeces because the laxatives you administered to your patients at 8am on the morning medication round have just kicked in and your elderly patient with dementia (who hasn’t had their bowels open for 4 days) is now having a mass evacuation 💩

It’s at this point that you’re beginning to wonder why you said yes to a double shift 🥴

These days, health services are becoming increasingly short-staffed, with many nurses having to work a double so patients have someone to care for them.

Generally, most nurses don’t work a double shift because they want to work 12 or 16 hours straight.

They do it because they care about their patients 🫶🏻

Because they don’t want to leave their team in the s**t (literally)💩

And because somewhere along the line, working a double became just another part of nursing culture.

Working a double doesn’t get you a trophy or upgrade you to hero status.

All it does is create exhaustion and puts you and your patients at risk of injuries and medication errors.

Nurses are humans. We are not machines that can continuously run on chocolate and caffeine.

What’s the longest shift you’ve ever worked?

12/06/2026

Day 13 - Crying in the car after work 😭

Your dog just died.

You got rear-ended driving to work.

You left your child at daycare in tears.

And you’ve just received a concerning phone call about a medical test.

Life.

It happens to all of us.

Then add to the mix your boss giving you a hard time, a long-term ‘frequent flyer’ patient who you’d formed a connection with taking their last breath, a full quota of heavy patients, and trying to smile and have the patience of a saint while you nurture a student nurse on their first ever placement.

Phew 😮‍💨

It’s a tough gig sometimes, and somehow most of us manage to keep our emotions under control until we hit the safety of our own car. Once we close the door, it’s like opening the flood gates and all of a sudden you’re allowed to feel every emotion that you’ve kept bottled up for the last 8, 10, or 12 hours.

In the silence of your car, it all comes pouring out.

You’re desperate to get home but you can’t drive yet because you can’t even see the road through the tears that are streaming down your cheeks like a waterfall.

Sometimes the car ride home is the only place where it finally all catches up with you.

11/06/2026

Day 12 - Patient death and grief 😔

Every nurse remembers their first patient death.

I was a student nurse, it was my first ever hospital placement and I can still remember so clearly the lead up to the moment that the 84 year old woman took her last breath. It wasn’t traumatic or particularly stressful.

But it also wasn’t expected.

Being so young and naive, I definitely didn’t expect it.

The older nurse I was buddied with had obviously seen many patients pass to the other side, so she dismissed this lady’s death with the wave of a hand.

I think I was still in shock.

That was to be the first of many patients that I nursed that would go to God in my care.

There is something dignified and honorable about helping someone pass over in peace and comfort.

However, dealing with death and grief is not my forte. Hats off to the incredibly generous and resilient nurses who work in palliative care, aged care, cancer wards, emergency departments, Intensive Care Units, Critical Care Units, and all the other places where death is more common than other departments.

I do not know how you do it.

10/06/2026

Day 11 - Trying to process traumatic shifts 🥺

Some shifts hit harder than others.

Emergency departments are great for showing you things that you should never have to see — like the guy whose hand had a fight with a chainsaw and lost, or the minivan full of Korean tourists who veered off the road and rolled into a ditch (and none of them were wearing seat belts 😣), or the 18-month-old baby who went into respiratory distress in an outback hospital and had to be flown out by the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

But let’s not limit trauma to emergency departments.

A midwife losing a baby. Or a mother. Or both.

People hurling abuse (either verbal or physical) under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Or having to do CPR on a patient on Boxing Day and the patient didn’t make it.

All in a day’s work apparently.

The thing is, these moments don’t just disappear when we clock off and go home. They can stay with us for days, months, or sometimes years.

Apart from the midwife example, these are all true stories of mine, and I know they’re not even half as traumatic as what many other nurses have experienced.

So how do we process shifts like this?

Fortunately, I’ve been able to attend debriefing sessions where the whole scenario was recounted and we were able to discuss and reflect on what happened.

I’m also a talkative person, so I’m happy to talk about traumatic events until they no longer cause me distress.

But not everyone processes things that way.

What helps you process traumatic shifts? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you

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Cobram, VIC
3644

Website

https://linktr.ee/simplysattva, http://www.simplysattva.com.au/

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