Courage Fatigue

[downer]

The idea of moral fatigue is interesting...are there any articles you could recommend? (Not to make it another 'worky' thing I have to do, but to understand myself, better, too.)

Moral fatigue is also known as moral distress, and is especially relevant to nursing when nurses are put in positions of treating patients in ways that they regard as wrong, or when they can only provide substandard care for patients because of understaffing or similar problems. There are a bunch of articles about it here.

[mamselle]

Thanks.

I didn't know to call it that, but definitely saw it in a couple of cases when working as a unit coordinator in a hospital, long ago.

One nurse, assigned to the four beds at the far end of the hall, with highly needy patients and a snippy nurse-neighbor in the ward next to hers, who could never see her way clear to being kind or helping others, especially, comes to mind.

Thinking of it now, maybe the snippy nurse was just in a more advanced phase of the same malaise.

Maybe we were all too quick to judge her at the time, too...

M.

[Stockmann]

I feel very, very tired. Both physically and mentally. Switching to online, etc actually increased my workload (if I want to keep my job, at any rate). Being cooped up drives my stress levels up, and I have family reasons to feel exhausted too. Then there's the pandemic itself - where I am, picture a situation that is probably Queens-in-April bad (but with a lot less testing) but with widespread Masque of the Red Death levels of denial and callousness.

[AmLitHist]

I'm a little better this afternoon, after teaching my first two LVL classes (which I thought I would heartily dislike, but they went OK).  Last week, though, I was completely wiped out. 

In fact, I completely took off the first two weeks of August, and most of last week as well.  Last week was packed with Service Week meetings, some of which reinforced some serious problems with a class I'm teaching, and instead of buckling down and getting that class ready to go, I ended up putting it off and waiting until the weekend to push through it all.

I still have a lit class that made unexpectedly at the last minute--I'm glad for the overload, and it's my area, so I love teaching it.  Still, I don't have the syllabus or schedule done for it yet, because I've always taught it in an online 8-week format, so I have to tweak deadlines and copy over materials.  None of it is a major problem, but I just can't bring myself to get it done.  I have materials and assignments ready for the first three weeks, and we met LVL this morning and students are OK with the way things stand, but I still wish I'd gotten it done.

I did get some crocheting done on my self-declared vacation, but even that was left sitting for long stretches.  Like many other here, I'm just flat out exhausted.  I hope things will get better as I get into the rhythm imposed by the TR class meetings on Zoom.

[secundem_artem]

I filled my Pez dispenser with Ativan.  Living better through chemistry.

[alto_stratus]

I have a bit of crisis fatigue. How can so many things be a crisis, requiring an urgent response, every day for 5 months? I feel like even my cancer center doesn't respond with as much urgency as is expected of me.

Not to mention weighing these demands up against personal struggles, including parents who bought into some kind of up-front lump sum retirement community that is having major structural issues with the building my parents are living in. My parents feel like it entitles them to move out because they're afraid of it collapsing. The management is not offering any solution as of yet.

Walking and breathing do help a lot - bring me back to a place that is not fueled by adrenaline. In the end, you can only do so much.

Edited to add: I did tap into a Brooklyn Lager tonight - did not make it to the weekend.

[polly_mer]

I have a bit of crisis fatigue. How can so many things be a crisis, requiring an urgent response, every day for 5 months? I feel like even my cancer center doesn't respond with as much urgency as is expected of me.

Yep and it's accelerating where I am because we've started the retirement wave without sufficient new hires.  Thus, we're trying to do knowledge capture, all the activities to hire in droves, and still meet all the current deliverables while under strict orders about what can be done from home and very limited access to specialized equipment.

[mamselle]

I just finished the two-hour online folk dance I missed last week.

Much better--happily exhausted in a good way.

Maybe that's what made last week so hard...I didn't go dancing!

I'm not saying that will solve all problems, I know it won't.

But the endorphins do help...

M.