School’s out for summer…or it will be soon! And we know what that means. Young people with free time on their hands means interesting times in the emergency room — and Very Long night shifts for those of us who have teenagers left to entertain themselves while we’re working. Finding life/work balance is always a stress, but I think summer puts it front and center. Everyone wants *us* — to go to the beach, to attend family functions, to host the parties and man the bbq, all the while being the best nurses we can possibly be.
No problem, right? We can do it all. All nurses possess superior multi-tasking abilities that allow us to compile shopping lists in our head while we’re passing meds and giving report: on the way home from our double, we can just pop into the store, pick up two carts full of groceries, come home to our magazine-perfect houses, call up all of our charming friends, and have a lovely impromptu summer get together with exquisitely catered food that we whipped up ourselves while waiting for our guests to arrive. After the festivities, we retire for a blissfully romantic evening with our partner, awaking after a perfect night’s sleep to do it all over again…
Or, conversely, we know sixteen reasons to justify serving ice cream sundaes for dinner, ideally consumed in the six seconds before we fall asleep in front of the television. Have you ever tried getting rocky road ice cream out of your hair? Not a pretty picture!
Humor helps us keep our perspective. We may not be able to do everything we want to do, but the ability to laugh makes it that much easier to enjoy the things we can do. A few minutes spent playing, laughing, and sharing good times with others can rejuvenate, restore, and replenish our emotional reserves. Humor is good for us, it’s good for our patients, it’s good for our families and friends — and it’s fun. So let’s make this the summer of laughter!
