1. I Knew How to Care for Everyone Except Myself

Hello, the last time I tried blogging I didn't even realize that I was blogging. I was working on my website, now active again victoriapetrovsky.com and was writing my bio for my About Me section. It turned into a long form post that was one of my pivotal awakening moments of when I got into a car accident.

What I didn't know back in 2019 when I was writing it that I know now is I was making it all about ME, sharing my story for me to showcase my writing, credentials, life experience VERSUS sharing it with the reader in mind and what they can glean from the experience of visiting my page and deciding whether or not they want to work with me (a common mistake many wellness and spiritual practitioners make) when making their first website.

What I didn't know then that I know now is that I was in "Self" of Faces of the Future's 6S Framework for business leadership (State -> Self -> Service -> Systems -> Stewardship -> Society). The fact that I was in Self was very clear. I was in a major season of Self-Discovery after my car accident awakening moment. I wanted to create a business and leave my hospital nursing job. The LLC name I chose was "What About Me Essentials". I thought I was building a self-care brand around customized Aromatherapy formulations (hence "Essentials"/Essential Oils, etc.) and my Reiki energy work for busy career oriented women. What it really was was a self-discovery vehicle for myself (such is a lot of entrepreneurship, a vehicle for self & spiritual development).

And so I'll backtrack and catch you up on a bit of that story prior to my wanting that career shift. And I'll start with "State".

In 2013 I was working a nursing job in acute care where I was on my feet all day for 12-14 hours at a time using my time and physical body/physical labor to earn a living. Physically lifting and moving patients with my co-workers colleagues (using poor body mechanics), and I was already having profession-related back pains typical of bedside nurses.

I was giving away a lot of emotional/empathic bandwidth caring for strangers/elderly (compassion fatigue) in life or death situations, using up my caring capacity reserves investing it in relationships that were not my friends or family. Which left me with very little bandwidth or energetic capacity to engage in the real relationships and friendships that mattered in my life.

I was living my life from vacation to vacation, looking forward to my next escape (literally to "vacate" my life).

I had no boundaries around me time, or any concept of self-care.

This job (and the hospital environment in general) also tested the maximum limits of my nervous system and my capacity. How do I stay regulated, composed and grounded enough to perform my job, make focused calculated high risk decisions (like monitoring vital signs for subtle changes, recognizing the signs and symptoms of when a patient is in decline, and knowing when to escalate it to the doctor and advocate for greater interventions for the patient??)

All while processing what felt like billions of inputs per second, scanning the environment for safety, from my patients' blaring cardiac alarms that buzzed my work phone when they went in and out of arrhythmias, (or irregular heart rhythms), to bed alarms screaming at volume 10/10 if a patient who was a high risk for falling and injuring themselves climbed out of bed because they had hospital related delirium. Or overhead announcements about Code Blues when a patient cardiac arrested in the hospital.

All whilst administering medications and being present with one person and their questions, getting called and paged by the front desk because another one of my patients' family members was stressed out by not being visited by the doctor yet in morning rounds and hearing an update about their family member.

All while receiving incessant phone calls, from physical therapists calling me to plan when they can come work with another one of my patients, or the pharmacy calling to clarify my medication refill requests.

All while training new budding nurses or nursing students on everything I was doing. At least 1 would follow me per shift, and trying to not get annoyed by their hundred of questions per day.

All while manually turning my patients in bed every 2 hours (even the 400lb+ ones on special bariatric beds) with 3 or 4 other people I had to scramble to recruit).

All while monitoring 101 year old intubated patients who had 25 "close relatives" because they were of a certain ethnic/religious background that has giant families and all 25 of them wanted to personally talk to me and receive an update about their family member.

All while me wondering existential questions of if their family member is actually even "consciously" alive besides being propped up on life support machines for his heart rate & blood pressure, & breathing tube down his throat (all optimized for perfect 120/80, heart Rate 75, respiratory rate of 12 aka perfect on paper, but was anyone actually even home still? vegetable status).

All while wondering is this even a good use of earthly resources of time, energy, attention or money and bloated hospital bills to sustain an existence that is not even possibly alive? (but that that poses a moral question for another day.)

All while getting "promoted" to the leadership role of charge nurse, which increased my level of responsibility 10x to answer not just for the 5 critically ill patients I was personally taking care of, but also all the patients that were occupying the 38 beds on my unit that 7 nurses each shift were taking care of.

All while receiving calls from Infection control about isolating contagious patients and moving patients around to accommodate the new isolation.

All while leading the morning meeting & midday interdisciplinary rounds to make sure all care & communication between doctors, physical therapists, social workers, staff nurses, and specialist nurses (totaling up to 50+ people at times) were coordinated and synchronized to meet timelines to discharge patients before noon.

All while answering to my nurse manager when things didn't go according to plan, like one of our patients falling, or a bedbound patient developing a bedsore from not being turned every 2 hours according to hospital protocol, or someone being discharged later than 12 noon.

All while covering other nurse's lunchbreaks and their phones while they were off the unit.

All while sometimes having 3-5 patients of my own, while managing and being in charge for the whole unit.

All while skipping or delaying my own lunch and making worse and worse decisions as the day went on from low blood sugar.

And then commuting, riding the New York City train and bus home (and possibly standing there too).

Needless to say this was my hell job (and even had that reputation within the hospital of being the most challenging place to work). And I was in a state of perpetual fight or flight internally, not able to focus with the billions of pings of alarms and calls per minute, running around in reactive mode "putting out fires" all day, many of which were not even my own but I had responsibility for (explicitly or implicitly).

I say implicitly because in many cases as a floor nurse, you are the first contact point for any type of dissatisfaction in the hospital coming from the patient/family member side about the doctors and timeliness of information or care. Or the doctor side about why hasn't the patient completed xyz yet (when i'm not responsible if they refused). While staying calm externally, despite it being one of the most incoherent or chaotic environments.

Needless to say, I had very little capacity for enjoying my life outside of work (you can maybe see why I was always looking for escape or vacation.

It was one of those jobs where for years (even years later after leaving this hell job) I woke up having PTSD because every day felt like going into battle when I came in for a 12 hour shift, dealing with massive amounts of uncertainty, decision fatigue and incoherence.

I learned a LOT about my nervous system, though I didn't have awareness of it back then besides from my nursing anatomy textbook of the brain connected to the spine and 2 segments of it being sympathetic (fight or flight) & parasympathetic (rest & digest).

I learned a LOT about nervous system entrainment and my super power in this domain. I noticed the kind of day I had when I was calm and regulated, versus chaotic & dysregulated. It influenced and entrained everyone around me, creating more coherence in my patients (and fewer life/death emergency crises), fewer emotional meltdowns from patients or their family members, and overall a better working environment for myself and my fellow nurses working the shift, especially when I was in charge.

I noticed what kind of day you had when you complained and bitched and moaned about life, or circumstances on the unit versus when you had gratitude and appreciation from heartfelt moments exchanged with patients, their family members and other teammates I worked with. What you put out in from your internal state (whether it is regulated or dysregulated) is what gets reflected back. We'll get more into the "woohoo" energetics side of that stuff in future posts.

But for now, we'll just say that this story ends in burnout with a car accident crescendo.

In summer of 2015 I got into a car accident that opened a huge awakening moment for me, but that's a story for another day.