Episode 4: Remembering Our Fallen Nurses

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Cara Lunsford

Oh, hey, nurses. Welcome to the Nurse Dot podcast. Giving nurses validation, resources and hope. One episode at a time. So today on Nurse Dot podcast.

Marla Barthen

We've lost many bedside providers and we have a gap of knowledge that was there and experience at the bedside. We are the walking wounded.

Cara Lunsford

Joining us today, Marla Barton, a registered nurse and nurse advocate who is passionate about the recognition of nurses and honoring the sacrifices that they make, especially when the sacrifice is their own life. I'm your host, Kara Lunsford, registered nurse and VP of community at Nurse Com. Oh.

Marla Barton, welcome to season two of the Nurse Dot podcast.

Marla Barthen

Congratulations. I'm so proud of you for being here in season one.

Cara Lunsford

Thank you. It has been quite a journey. It's been a lot of fun. I've been able to interview some really incredible people and I was really looking forward to having you on. And for those of you listening who don't know, last year, Nurse dot com and Marla and lots of other people got together and we were able to like pull off the nurses march in memorial and it was fantastic.

I mean, first of all, I couldn't even believe what you were able to do. I was like in all of you the entire time. Marla Like what? You were able to execute and get done in the short period of time that we had. But I wanted you to talk a little bit about, like, what that Nurses March and Memorial meant to you and why it was so important that we do that last year.

Marla Barthen

Yeah, it was definitely six weeks of fired up energy and coordination and you couldn't have done something like that without the passion to get something like that done and the collaboration. There were a lot of folks who were invested and seeing it, and so I think that was a big part of it for me, was helping people to see the need for it.

I am a person who believes in remembrance and looking back and I think we as nurses get very much focused in on the emergency at hand, the thing that we need to respond to. We're not great with self-care care. We're not great at saying, okay, this is something that we committed to and we're thrown in. But I also wanted the community and businesses and organizations to look at the sacrifices that nurses have made and not take that for granted and to actually be able to say, we see you and we see what you've given and we honor that.

So for me, that was the importance of it. So I was invested right off the bat. You know, I'm a nurse in my fifties now and my best friend is in her fifties. And so we call ourselves like the geriatric ICU nurses, critical care nurses. It can because, you know, in today's world, you were terminating people. And those folks know there very heavy patients that are most susceptible of COVID.

And I did that go back in to work in the ICU. And she did. And we had a very good conversation about the situation. I'm in my fifties. I have co-morbidities and there was no vaccine. She said, stay home, stay safe. So I found other ways to contribute. And my best team is out in L.A. and Seattle working her tail off.

So in as many as she could. So this opportunity for us to get together and come to Washington and share experiences and be together meant something to me.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, it was quite a remarkable time. And somebody captured a picture of me standing with a couple of my colleagues, and I was just sobbing. I mean, I felt like what we really needed was just this. We needed to come together and grieve because sometimes everything just goes by so quickly and you go from already being burned out, moral distress, moral injury before the pandemic.

Then you go into a pandemic. Now you're in survival mode, right? And you're just there just trying to save lives. You're just trying to stay afloat. You're trying to be there for your coworkers. You're trying to do it all right. And also be there for your family. And people are getting sick. Colleagues are getting sick. Nurses are dying, you know, who have worked on the front lines during the pandemic.

And there's just there's not even time to recognize them. Like there wasn't even time to say this person passed away. This person passed away. It was like it's like you're in a war, really. And I felt like you really took this incredible opportunity at the nurses memorial to highlight and to actually showcase the faces of people who had passed on.

Marla Barthen

Yeah, I think that that's been an important part to me. I was very blessed in nursing home work to work with veterans. And so we've always done something for Veterans Day, and you've never seen something so sentimental, heartbreaking, and to see the pain still of remembrance on a veteran. You know, we would do this flag raising. We would always bring new flags and we put those up and we'd always have the students there to change it with the flags and every flag service that we do for this, they would just be crying, you know, all these years later, 50 years later, you know, 70 years later, these were grown men and wives of servicemen who

were all very touched and remembering that. So I feel like we had this experience last year in D.C., but I think ten years from now, 20 years from now, when we all kind of get together and have these moments, we will have remembrance and we will have shared grieving for years to come because this was a moment in time, moment in history where we stepped up and we were, you know, you're called to do these things, but nobody knows what you went through except for this group together.

And the closest that it comes to and our folks who serve in the military, firefighters in tears and in our police service, we understand what we give. And so I think of us as a service heart. And we we know that we would give all that we could to this career. But we also need a moment to grieve what we've lost.

And if we don't do it and I felt like we were in such danger not addressing our PTSD and see how we can get on a journey of healing if we didn't mark the moment.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, that I mean, that's it, right? You have to. I'm thinking about this podcast, right? And we always say in the podcast, providing nurses with validation resources and hope one episode at a time, because as we have to start with that validation, you have to start with speaking the truth, speaking the reality so that people can internalize, that they can take it in and then they can process it and then hopefully they can move forward.

So I feel like that's exactly what you were doing at the memorial, was just giving people that opportunity to take it all in because we're just so busy. We're so busy. We don't sit down and sometimes we just don't want to open Pandora's box. You know, sometimes there's a fear that the grief is overwhelming and that if you open it up and you look at it, what will come out?

How much grief are we holding inside of us? That if we really pay attention to it, maybe we won't be able to stop crying? Like maybe we'll just cry and cry and cry.

Marla Barthen

But do you think that's the fear, right? That that will be broken and not be able to be repaired and restored? I think that is true. I think that we are excellent at short term coping mechanisms that become our long term coping mechanisms. I will attest some fantastic at compartmentalizing. One of my one of my favorites to go to, but I also see myself do repression.

And I felt like that's about where we were at. We were really stuffing it down deep because you know, we really didn't have a chance to have any recovery time. And we were just it constant, you know, two years at that point of constant fear, death, and not just that just the American people and how and worldwide that just our own folks in civilian life of it.

You know, we kind of went from this. The public always saw us as a revered profession. Right. Always the most trusted profession. We were a revered profession and we were finding ourselves getting more violence against us. People were spitting at gas stations, didn't want to see us in our uniforms after work. I mean, there are a lot of stories that I don't know that we're really ready to tell yet, but I think you will have episodes for years to come on this career because I think the stories will be able folks will be able to speak about it.

Little by little, it will trickle out of experiences that happened.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, I agree. I was just thinking about the title of our podcast, which is remembering our Fallen nurses. And I think often times we link that to automatically death. These are the nurses that have died, but I actually feel like fallen nurses does not necessarily just indicate people who have died. Yes, it does. They're included in this. I think.

Of course they're included. But there are so many nurses that have fallen because now they can no longer do this work anymore. They've left the profession and it has broken them to such a point that they had to exit. They had to leave, they had to go put their own oxygen mask on. And maybe once upon a time they loved this profession and all they could ever see themselves doing was taking care of patients and people and humanity.

And now suddenly they can no longer do it. I think there's way more fallen nurses than we can understand. And what I'm saying is it's not just death.

Marla Barthen

Now, I've done some research recently about this. What stood out to me were some age brackets, and so I've saw that our nurses who were of retirement age but still want to stand still working. Right. Because that's what we we do. Some of them went ahead and took retirement as soon as they were eligible. So that was that was a percentage that had been lost.

And then I look at the nurses who are in their late forties, early fifties, and I count myself in the overweight group of nurses that they've been doing it for a long time. And they're maybe not the best health habits right in their daily lives. And so that is the group who really succumbed to COVID. And as far as COVID death, especially inside our correctional nursing and our long term care nurses, you know, folks who are not given the same amount of tools to do their jobs that we were in the hospitals.

And so they were at much greater risk for lots of reasons. And then you kind of look at the the nurses who are I feel like we were in most danger is those nurses in their thirties to forties who are experienced nurses where the suicide rates are going up. Those are folks who are tenured nurses who have done it and they don't really see what can I do differently.

They're not really seeing a way out anymore because, you know, there's the PTSD piece of it, but there's just that, you know, as COVID ends, I feel like we are at the very difficult part now. I think that we we are seeing more suicide when we talk about physician suicide rates. But nurses suicide rates are like the highest that we are, and plus we are the highest number in health care.

Bonnie So we have too many nurses that have died as a result of suicides. So I think of that age bracket is really most affected. And then when I look at our younger nurses, they are really quantifying and taking stock of in this money for my education. You know, how can I spin this and pivot this into something else kind of quickly?

I'm going to move away from at bedside or I'm going to take this opportunity to go back to school and be an advanced practice nurse. And so we've lost many bedside providers and we have a gap of knowledge that was there and experience at the bedside. And so the gap is just so big now, and I think it's still widening.

We're not going to be able to assess it all until we're towards the end. I think we'll be looking back at this five and ten years later and being able to really analyze what we lost. But as far as having a plan to wipe our losses and to rehabilitate our nurses, we are the walking wounded.

Cara Lunsford

The walking wounded, that is. Boy, that phrase says it all. We are the walking wounded. I'm glad that you brought up the topic of suicide, because I think that so often when everyone's in the crisis, when we're all in the pandemic together, right, there was a lot of awareness in some ways, like there was a lot of talk of like, make sure you're getting the mental health that you need or make sure you're getting therapy.

I mean, I feel like I was seeing a calm app and the mindfulness apps coming up to the surface and all of this stuff, like not necessarily the health care system reminding people to take care of themselves. But I kept seeing all of these therapy apps and all of these things. And then I think like, what happens is that society in general, like moves on really fast, right?

It's like, Oh, it's over, the Band-Aid is over. And that's when it's really dangerous, right? Because then there's the people who are like, now they're in the PTSD right now. They're in the moment where they're struggling with everything that they saw, did, witnessed, experience, the whole thing, and everyone around them is just moving on, like moving on in a way from the pandemic.

And when I say everyone, I'm talking about friends and family and it can be very lonely because you're now kind of left to digest everything that you went through and you just see people around you just moving on.

Marla Barthen

I agree with you. I think about that in terms of anybody, even if you're not a nurse, I feel like you could relate to this. Anyone who's lost somebody close to them, you know, there are a lot of casseroles given to you, Right. And and so your freezer would get stocked up of casseroles and and the folks stop by.

And there there's an outpouring right at once. A casserole is eaten. It feels like that's when the true piece of grief and all that is hitting you. And it doesn't feel like you have the people around you to help support you through that. So I think anybody that's dealt with a death close to them would see that. And I felt like this was very important for us last year because there was so much more.

We had come out of Comic-Con. That wave was a big wave and things were opening back up again. Spring had sprung. Everything wanted to be outside. And so we did see people begin to really forget. And I don't think that they meant that in any intentional way of as almost feel like them looking back at us, they didn't want to see the pain.

I almost feel like they don't want to relive it. They don't want to deal with that. They just want to go out and take a nice walk and do something else. They don't want to see it talk about when they don't talk about the piece of that, because for their own mental health, they need to move forward. And so I do feel like we were at different stages of grief then.

Cara Lunsford

And just imagine and the people who were there and they were on the front lines of all of this, they had all of these experiences. And then when things became very political, very divisive, not only could people not speak freely about what they were experiencing, but sometimes they were met with confrontation around it. And that makes it even I mean, that's even worse, you know?

Marla Barthen

So naysayers said this information all that was in their face. But at the end of the day, these were folks going to do their job. The people who I think that we probably could relate the most with are Vietnam vets. You know, I think when you think of World War Two, there was such a great outpouring of national sentiment.

Right? Everybody was working for the effort in Vietnam was very contentious. And I feel like COVID became as contentious as that.

Cara Lunsford

That is a great analogy. And all this time I actually have never thought of it that way. But that's exactly right. That was a time Vietnam was a time where there was a lot of differing opinions. You know, there were people out there on the front lines and some people applauding them and some people booing them. And some people, you know, that was just very, very difficult.

And I imagine very if you see the Vietnam vets now, there's a lot of trauma there. I mean, a lot of trauma. I would venture to say maybe I don't know if it's more or statistically if those veterans have more PTSD than anyone else. But it would be interesting. I don't know. I haven't ever really looked into it.

Marla Barthen

I would probably go as far as to say they have more complex trauma because.

Cara Lunsford

That would make sense.

Marla Barthen

Yeah, they have a different experience. And, you know, trauma as trauma as trauma. I say the same thing about shock, right? Shock. The shock. The shock. The shock is, is nurses getting a term nursing talk. The causes are different but expresses itself about the same. So I feel like trauma is the same way, that complex trauma is something different.

And I feel like we probably are kindred spirits with our Vietnam vets on that one.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, I'm so glad that we were able to connect on this. And I have a feeling that before this this podcast goes live, I'm probably going to reach out to you because I'll have like a few more questions and a few more things that I am going to want to add in to this podcast, because usually as I'm listening to it, I'm like, Oh, you know what?

I need to call Marla. I need to ask her about this. I'm having an epiphany here.

Marla Barthen

I'm always on speed dial. It's not a problem, you know, because they think about things and I try to look at things macro, but I am never too far away from the direct experience.

Cara Lunsford

Yeah, I just want to really I want to really thank you for the work that you've done and how you really are keeping the memory of people alive. You're consistently reminding us to not forget and how important it is for us to take that time to have awareness about this. And it really it people like you are the ones that help, the ones that will bury their head in the sand or just trudge forward.

And I'm just so grateful that we have people like you who are reminding us.

Marla Barthen

But I appreciate you just as well, my friend. And and the work that you do with Nurse dot com and Ray Rice. I think that they were phenomenal in the way that they mobilized and stepped up. And there is also I want us to put on some instant replays of all of the musicians in the world that kind of gave us some love during that time.

I could feel the pain with us and I think songwriters and poets and those folks really can meet the moment with us so much when something's happening and I always turn to them. I think of the music that we played and and the folks that we heard from. And I tell people all the time, I'm like, Diane Warren wrote us a little ditty.

Cara Lunsford

How beautiful was that?

Marla Barthen

It was a beautiful moment. And I do feel like we need to reach out and touch each other with some love and some grace as we move through this, because it's a long road ahead.

Cara Lunsford

Absolutely. Marlo, my friend, I love you. Thank you so much for joining me. And you'll be getting a call from me because I'm for sure going to have some questions that I'm going to want you to answer.

Marla Barthen

Great. I'll share some research with you, do some things, and then that's perfect.

Cara Lunsford

All right, my love, and tell next time.

Marla Barthen

My always being next on my friends.

Cara Lunsford

Favor and.

If you are a nurse who enjoyed this episode and you have an idea for future episodes, you can connect with me by downloading the nurse dot com app.

See you there.