Growing up, Kadee Klafka, registered nurse, always wanted to help others. She always imagined herself in healthcare and always had a curiosity for medicine.
“There were different times in my life where I thought I’d be a doctor,” she says. “In the end when it came down to making these important decisions, nursing seemed like the most clear path for me, and I knew I’d really enjoy it.”
Kadee, a nurse at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital where she works in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, experienced loss of passion due to job burnout in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. She says in critical care nursing, days are always full of paying very close attention to her patients and their needs.
“Compassion fatigue is a big thing I think most of us experienced during COVID,” she says. “I saw so much hardship, fear, pain, suffering, that there were periods where I felt completely detached from what I was doing. I was cynical, I felt like I wasn’t doing any good for my patients. It all felt hopeless.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, job burnout is a unique type of work-related stress. It is a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.
“There were days I didn’t want to go back to work,” says Kadee. “They were exhausting and draining, and I was already out of energy to give.”
According to the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences some causes of burnout within the nursing field include lack of support, emotional strain, long hours, lack of sleep, and high rates of turnover causing low-staffing issues within hospitals.
“We nurses work 12 hours straight,” says Kadee. “During COVID, we were faced with so much more stress and workload. I would come home, maybe have a difficult time sleeping, and would need a full day of doing absolutely nothing to recover.”
Kadee says that because COVID had such a severe effect on her, she fought with friends and family over vaccination status while simultaneously worrying about her patients she had just taken care of in her previous shift. Doing this for months on end led her to a place where she could not care anymore.
It was a place where she became a robot — did what needed to
be done and went home, again
and again.
“I don’t think you normally feel burnout set in,” she says. “It creeps up slowly until you start recognizing you are tired all the time or don’t have the mental or physical capacity to care about the things you once did. You start asking yourself, ‘Why do I feel like this?’”
Kadee realizes now that most of her friends were burnt out long before they ever recognized it in themselves. It took having conversations with one another to fully come to terms with what they were experiencing.
While she often thinks about what she would do if she were not a nurse, Kadee says that she has never fully entertained the idea or made plans to leave nursing.
“Nursing is such a broad area of practice that when it is my time to leave the bedside or critical care all together, I know there is a world of nursing positions that I can succeed in with a different pace and a different kind of stress,” she says, “… but I am grateful that I have found a purpose in what I am doing and that I have the opportunity to take care of our community in the way I am now.”
Contrary to Kadee, Summer Whelchel, certified critical care nurse, swore to herself growing up that she would never become a nurse. Having several family members who worked in the medical field, she saw how difficult the job was and knew that the schedule was less than ideal.
Summer graduated from Ball State University in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in public relations and religious studies, but after a personal experience where she was treated by health care providers who saved her life six years after her graduation, she says she felt a strong call to become a nurse.
She went back to school to pursue nursing, left her full-time job at Sallie Mae and took a job at a hospital in Indianapolis and began taking prerequisite courses for the nursing program at Ball State.
“I wanted to help people who are routinely overlooked in our medical system such as drug addicts, people of color, women, and those with obesity,” says Summer. “Working as a tech, I fell in love with nursing, helping people and connecting with my patients and their families. I saw it as a way I could help better the world.”
Even as a patient support technician, Summer says she frequently oriented new hires. Once she became a registered nurse, Summer often helped train new hires. She grew to enjoy the art of teaching.
Summer decided to pursue teaching and in 2021 graduated with a master’s degree from Western Governors University and began teaching part time at Indiana Wesleyan University. While burnout did not cause her to leave the hospital as a full-time nurse, Summer says that it was the catalyst for her to begin teaching full time instead of
part time.
Summer says that working in the hospitals during COVID was “insane.” Patients who were essentially healthy besides having high blood pressure or diabetes and those who were relatively young would be admitted. She says that these patients were different from their usual patients because they were awake, alert and aware of their surroundings and would often not seem like they were in distress.
She began experiencing burnout symptoms like sleep deregulation, anxiety, anger, nightmares, panic attacks, mood swings, hypertension, and insomnia — some of the most severe symptoms according to the Mayo Clinic.
“There comes a point when you ultimately feel defeated,” she says. “You experience grief with your patients and their families, and you must suck it up and enter the next room with a smile. You have to come home, act normally and function normally as if nothing happened. You stuff it all deep inside.”
While these symptoms did not make it harder for her to go to work, Summer says that it made it harder to not take work home with her and to be the happy-go-lucky mom and wife when she held the hand of three people that died that day.
“I love my patients, I love nursing, but the health care system and current health care climate make it extraordinarily difficult for bedside nursing to be a sustainable or physically-tolerated career over a long time,” Summer says.
Summer also notes that the long hours, heavy lifting, lack of staff and hard floors take an incredible toll on nurse’s bodies in addition to the schedules, long hours, abuse, and emotional trauma.
“Some of our patients touch our hearts and become like family, and some of our patients physically assault us and verbally abuse us,” she says. “‘It’s in the job description,’ they say. ‘It’s what we sign up for,’ they say. But it’s abuse, and we shouldn’t have to stand for that.”
Summer says that teaching brought back the passion that she originally had as a new nurse. The passion her students had was contagious, and it reminded her of how she once felt. The opportunity to teach full time at Ball State became available, and she accepted.
“I love nursing, I love the hospital, and I still work there occasionally on breaks. The change has been a nice mix for me, allowing me to do two things I love,” she says. “It is a wonderful school with wonderful facilities and faculty.”
Both Summer and Kadee agree, however, that many, if not all, nurses at some point have experienced burnout and have recognized that loss of passion. Summer says that while she has never lost passion for people or for providing them with proper care, she has lost passion for the health care system.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hospital staffing shortages peaked at 22% in January of last year.
“The issue is more complex and multifaceted than people realize,” she says. “The health care system was in trouble pre-pandemic. Then we threw a crisis on top of it. It is essential that we fix it; our lives literally depend on it.”
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