Member-only story
I’m a Health Care Worker, and I Did Not Sign Up for This
A dispatch from the front lines
“You’re a health care professional. You signed up for this.”
I am an X-ray technologist at a very busy and often overcrowded regional hospital.
I pursued this difficult yet rewarding profession to provide essential, compassionate, and quality patient care. I knew I’d have to spend long days on my feet, wearing heavy lead aprons, and pushing around awkwardly large machinery. I knew my body and joints would ache from pushing stretchers, transferring patients, and maneuvering uncooperative people into position.
In school, they told me I would see the cancer before the patient knew they had it, but that I had to learn how to keep a smile on my face for the rest of the exam.
They told me I would be a part of patients’ most emotional moments. I’ve held hands, dried tears, provided warm blankets, and comforted when I could. I’ve been part of the team when a patient is admitted, waiting nearby with my X-ray board as they are coding with cardiac arrest in the ER, and present for their last breath in the ICU. I’ve placed X-ray boards under newborn babies as small as my hand.
They warned me about going to the morgue, and that seeing the colorless, stiff, cold bodies would be…
