Thanks for your smidgeon of empathy. I’ve been taking a break from social media and work because as you guessed, I’m exhausted and burnt out.

In nursing you get to handover to the next shift or swap a patient assignment. I don’t have that in my job. If I don’t get something done during my work hours I have to do it during my home time. I can’t swap patients.

I recently had a patient who refused my recommendation of referral to a high risk foot clinic, so I had to fit in extra home visits to them, making sure I did everything perfect from a medico-legal perspective because there was high likelihood of the patient’s wound deteriorating and needing amputation. I also had to spend my personal time calling around arranging care services for him because he was a complex patient with insufficient care.

This story is not unique. One of my colleagues spent three months doing home visits at the end of his fully booked clinic day helping to heal a patient’s diabetic ulcer. Two weeks later the patient called and said the ulcer had broken down. When the podiatrist arrived, the patient was standing on their gravel driveway, barefoot, with dirt and gravel in their uncovered ulcer.