Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
I am sick and tired of compassion.
I wasn't always like this.
When I started my nurse training at the age of 17,
I didn’t think much about compassion at all.
I thought about resuscitation and saving lives and cracking chests.
I thought a lot about television programs,
like E.R.,
and I thought a great deal about George Clooney.
(Laughter)
But nursing taught me pretty quickly
that saving lives is about a lot more than cracking chests.
In 2018, I left the nursing register.
And I am a writer and Professor of Medical and Health Humanities,
and my research over the last few years
has been about compassion, and empathy, and kindness,
and what it means to be human.
And central to the idea of all my work
is that compassion is the most important thing of all.
And yet,
I realized that during my years as a hospital nurse,
particularly in intensive care,
I felt a bit burnt out,
apathetic,
and sometimes even indifferent to extreme suffering.
I was experiencing compassion fatigue.
Pain and trauma, like viruses, can be extremely infectious,
and nurses, and other healthcare workers, they swallow suffering every single day.
Indeed, the word “compassion” comes from Latin “compassiōnem,”
which means “to suffer with,” “suffering together,”
and there’s only so long you can do that for,
if you do it right,
without becoming a little bit numb.
I felt a bit numb.
And then came the pandemic.
I remember being on a flight once, coming back from Kenya.
There was an announcement on the Tannoy:
“Is there a doctor or nurse on board the plane?”
I looked around.
Nothing.
And then the announcement again:
“Is there a nurse or doctor on board the plane?
Please make yourself known to the cabin crew.”
Now, I had no intention of making myself known.
In fact, I slid down my seat.
I wanted to drink my gin and tonic and read my magazine in peace.
But the announcement again, and this time the voice was urgent:
“Is there a healthcare worker on the plane?
Please, we need help.
We need help.”
And so,
I slowly and reluctantly raised my hand.
During the first peak of this pandemic,
I slowly and I reluctantly raised my hand again,
and I returned to clinical work for a short time.
I found myself the lead nurse for compassionate care
in one of the field hospitals
that had been hastily set up in just nine days as a COVID ICU.
We were told our function was to save as many lives as possible.
And it quickly became very apparent with this awful, awful disease
that we weren’t going to save anywhere near as many lives as we wanted to,
and compassion became our central aim.
Compassion, we realized, is how history will judge us,
and it’s how history should judge us.
We weren’t alone in our thinking;
there was a time at the beginning of this,
a hot moment, when the world felt alive with compassion.
It's like we were shaken awake.
How quickly we forget.
One minute people were on their doorsteps,
they were banging pots and clapping for carers
and delivering food parcels to their neighbours who were shielding,
and the very next moment people’s curtains closed.
Everyone shuffled past each other, heads down, no eye contact.
Everyone turned inwards -
we all did -
just trying to process our own pain.
And a collective numbness swept through the world.
It is no surprise.
We are bombarded with tragedy.
The COVID-19 pandemic uncovered the other pandemics that already existed:
loneliness, inequality, injustice, violence, racism, mental illness.
The events in Afghanistan, they’re hard to even think of.
And the existential threats of climate change,
we are now told, is code red for humanity.
We are tired.
We are overwhelmed,
and we’re saturated with images of devastating suffering,
and so, sometimes it’s all we can do to turn off the relentless news
and watch Love Island instead.
(Laughter)
Maybe that’s just me.
But it is possible to recover from this compassion fatigue.
We must recover from it.
I know it’s possible because I did.
Shortly after returning to clinical work,
I remembered something really, really important.
I remembered what my patients had taught me,
and I remembered what it means to be a nurse.
In all my years in hospitals, I never once met George Clooney.
(Laughter)
But I did meet lots of patients like Betty.
Betty was elderly and frail, and she was alone,
And she was lying on a trolley in a corridor
outside Accident & Emergency.
She’d come into the hospital with chest pain and hypothermia.
I did a 12-lead ECG, some observations, some blood tests,
and we couldn't find anything at all wrong with Betty.
So I got this Bair Hugger machine,
which has white billowing fabric to warm her up.
And I made her a sandwich and a cup of tea.
I just sat with her and held her hand.
And then she told me about Stan.
She told me Stan, her husband of a lifetime,
had died in the hospital two weeks before.
She described her heart pain, not chest pain.
She told me how they had danced,
and how the fabric from the Bair Hugger machine
reminded her of the parachute silk from her wedding dress,
and how time flies.
She said I’d saved her life.
Of course, I’d done no such thing.
I just sat with her a while and I held her hand.
But it was impossible to tell
where Betty’s hand ended and where my hand began,
and nursing exists in that space.
We exist in that space.
What a privilege to hold the hand of a person
at the frailest, most extreme and significant moment of their life,
to be a nurse.
Nurses remind us that we are not alone,
not even now.
But, of course, they do a lot more than hold hands.
Nurses are safety-critical, rigorously trained professionals.
They are scientists and researchers and leaders and entrepreneurs
and artists, and they’re clinical experts.
They weave around our world caring for people
in every setting you can imagine:
school nurses, district nurses,
practitioners working in mental health and learning disability settings,
forensic nurses, military nurses,
nurses working in prisons, on homeless healthcare teams,
in hospices.
we’ve looked after children.
There are even nurses working behind the scenes on Love Island.
(Laughter)
The World Health Organization estimates there are 27.9 million nurses globally.
27.9 million individuals who have, despite personal risk,
placed compassion at the center of their universe for us.
Nursing is a language with many different accents,
but it’s a universal language too.
It’s a kind of faith in itself, with compassion at its core,
a belief and respect in every single individual’s worth, regardless.
If how we treat our most vulnerable is a measure of our society,
then the act of nursing itself is a measure of our humanity,
and we all are now thinking, during this time of great suffering,
about our humanity.
Who are we?
Who are we meant to be?
COVID has given all of us the time for radical change
and the chance for radical change.
But we must shake ourselves awake again
and remember the action we saw at the beginning of this pandemic
when we glimpsed our capacity
for grace, for tolerance, and for love.
We can remind each other of our potential by listening, really listening,
thinking of other families as well as our own,
by helping those who need help in practical ways
and building inclusive communities.
Betty was right.
Nurses are right.
Compassion cannot cure us,
but compassion can save us, regardless.
The word “compassion” comes from “compassionem,”
meaning “to suffer with,”
but the word “suffer” comes from feeling, “to feel keenly.”
In this age of isolationism and division and hatred,
it is not feeling anything that we all must fear.
In order to turn outwards, we need to feel all the feelings
and remember our capacity, our incredible human spirit.
It’s time for us to raise our hands.
Rumi was a 13th century Afghan poet.
In my opinion, he was the greatest poet in all of history.
And I’m going to leave you with his words, more relevant today than perhaps ever:
“I know you are tired, but come.
This is the way.”
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)