 Hi guys! So today I wanted to do a video on empathy and I actually got this question from when you guys and I want to read it for you because I thought this was a very very great question that we could discuss. So the question is on my Instagram and it's from Matthew. I don't know if you want me to share your Instagram or not so I'm just gonna read the question. It says, do you still feel empathy for chronic alcoholic patients or whatever type of patient? I feel I felt bad for my patient last night but a lot of the reason why but a lot of the reason why she was there was her own fault. I'm torn between spending the energy to still care and dissociating myself from some of my patients entirely. I feel like I'm a bad nurse for not caring but I feel drained of emotional energy if I do care and I thought this was a fantastic question because it's something that every nurse is going to come across and struggle with some more than others and I definitely struggled with this early on in my nursing career because you just care so much especially when you're a new nurse you want to help everyone you want to save everyone and then you get to the real world of nursing and you realize that there are patients they make their own decisions they've made their bed and they've slept in it so to speak and no matter if you give all of your energy and time and caring and love and support to them they're still gonna turn around and do the things that they shouldn't i.e. if you're a chronic alcoholic or chronic drug abuser and you find yourself in this position where you've given so much of your time and energy to someone and cared so much and then you're disappointed because they don't meet this criteria they don't succeed and you take that as a personal failure and then you just feel burnt out and a lack of energy but then on the flip side if you just associate yourself and you act like you don't care then you come across as like a harsh burnt out nurse so finding this fine balance is tough and so that's kind of what I want to talk about I struggled with this a lot when I first became a nurse because I just was so motivated I want to help everyone and then I realized that no matter how much you give of yourself to someone they're not gonna make a change in themselves unless they feel they need to make that change and it's finding this balance between still offering emotional and physical medical support to someone and being available but not taking that home with you and still to a certain extent putting up this wall but it's hard because you don't want to put up so much of a wall to where you just don't care at all because I feel like no matter how long you've been a nurse no matter how many terrible situations you've seen or patients fail or they do things you know you've given so much of yourself still part of you always cares because you're always hoping to see the best in someone or the best outcome in your patients and if you lose that then it's really time to start finding another position and I actually talked with a very very seasoned nurse I think she's been a nurse for over 30 years just yesterday on my shift we were talking about this and I was saying you know I see because I work in ICU I see a very very tough position because we see a lot of people that come in that die that come in who've created their own issues and that are very very sick and there's people who live who probably shouldn't have lived and there's people who die that shouldn't have died and I was I was talking to this nurse just how it's taken a while to learn how to still offer someone empathy but not but to still remain kind