The Autopsy & Farewell

A Nurse’s Reckoning With Burnout

Time of Death: Indeterminate

How do you know when something is truly dead? Or a better question, how do you define death? Is it when the heart stops? When breathing ceases? Or does death settle in long before—when passion is drained, when love is too worn out to fight, when a piece of your soul has already slipped away?

If you were to cut open my nursing career and lay it bare, what would you find? Would you see the excited, beating heart of a starry-eyed young nurse who once believed she could save the world? Would you trace the scars left by neglect, exhaustion, grief and the quiet erosion of self-worth? Would you examine the holes left by the pieces of me that I lost in hospital hallways, exam rooms and the cold sterility of corporate medicine?

Every ending deserves an examination. Every loss demands an explanation.

Stepping away has given me the space to truly reflect, with the ultimate intent to heal and forgive. My passion for nursing didn’t die in a single moment. It withered—slowly, painfully. A death by a thousand cuts, the result of years of pressure, exhaustion, sacrifice.

I have laid it out for a final examination, piece by piece, not in mourning, but in recognition: some things aren’t meant to be revived.

Cause of Death: A Slow Bleed of Burnout

It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t one catastrophic event, but a slow, steady hemorrhage—shift after shift, a relentless battle against time, policy, my own expectations, toxic colleagues and leadership and a system that demanded more than any human could sustainably give.

At first, I ignored the fatigue creeping in, denied my fading passion, self-shamed my thinning patience and feared the way my compassion—once endless—became rationed, doled out carefully so I wouldn’t run out before my shift was over.

I told myself I could handle it, that this was just part of the job. I had to handle it. Suck it up. Because if I wasn’t an ER nurse, then what was left? When the soul-level exhaustion set in, I thought the flaw was in me. I blamed myself, called myself weak, pushed forward even as every fiber of my being screamed, ENOUGH.

But even warriors break when they’ve been fighting for too long.

Manner of Death: Homicide by a Broken System

Nursing itself didn’t kill me. The system did.

The chronic understaffing that turned every shift into a survival game—where we had to decide which patient needed us most because there weren’t enough hands to go around. Where we were forced to double our ratios, leave a single triage nurse alone with dozens of sick patients waiting unattended and tuck patients into back hallways and dusty corners without monitors or oversight. Every day, we feared the moment when something would go terribly wrong, because there simply was no one there to help us.

The endless piling on of responsibilities—rigid charting requirements that stole precious time from patient care, hospital policies that changed overnight without warning or education, last minute mandatory training with a threatened write up if we couldn’t attend, the expectation to work with zero breaks, to stay late, to pick up just one more shift as if we weren’t already running on fumes.

The unsafe patient loads that made it impossible to give the care we wanted to give—the kind that every patient deserved. The days when five patients became seven, then eight, then more, with no backup, no relief, just the suffocating weight of knowing that one missed detail, one misstep, could be the difference between life and death.

The administrators who count profits instead of pulses—who sat in their cushy boardrooms debating budget cuts while we scrambled to find basic supplies, who cut staffing to save costs while we drowned in impossible workloads, who praised our resilience with a box of pizza while nurses nearly collapsed from exhaustion.

The lack of support in every sense of the word—from management and human resource reps that gaslit us when we voiced concerns, from a healthcare system that expects nurses to be everything at once: caregivers, tech support, social workers, janitors, crisis counselors. The unspoken rule that no matter how overwhelmed or how understaffed, we would figure it out.

What choice were we left with? This was our passion, our career, our life’s work. The more we “figured it out”, the more they demanded and the higher their expectations became.

The constant emails about failing to meet metrics while we struggled just to meet basic human needs. The pressure to improve patient satisfaction scores when we barely had time to offer a comforting word. My favorite suggested remedy was to “give the patients socks, pillows, blankets, sandwiches” when there were none to be found. The corporate initiatives promising “wellness” while we regularly skipped meals, ignored full bladders and charted beyond our shifts, unpaid.

I watched patients increasingly become numbers— their needs reduced to statistics and dollar signs, their outcomes measured in data points instead of dignity.

I watched nurses become disposable. Burnt out? Zero support, no concern, no hand extended in comfort. There’s always another body to take your place—until there isn’t. Until the exodus is too great to ignore.

And I nearly missed myself becoming someone I didn’t recognize.
Someone who flinched at the sound of a call light or phone ringing, because it meant another request when she was already drowning.
Someone who felt resentment and rage where empathy used to be, because she had given everything she had, and it still wasn’t enough.
Someone who sat in the car before many shifts, tears flowing, hands shaking, staring at the hospital doors, whispering I can’t do this anymore.

That’s when I knew—something had to change.

Postmortem Findings: What I Lost, What I Gained

The losses didn’t just manifest as changes in me at work.

Nursing took pieces of me that I feared I would never get back—would never normalize. It took my sleep, my health, my hobbies, my desire to connect with others, including my family.  It took my peace of mind and my belief that hard work is always rewarded. It took my trust in a system that promised to care for the caregivers, but instead drained us dry and left us scrambling to put ourselves back together.

But it also gave me something.

It gave me resilience—the kind that comes from the feeling of holding someone’s hand in their final moments, from making impossible decisions under pressure, from finding strength when there is none.

It gave me stories—ones filled with humanity, humility, heartbreak and the undeniable proof that even in life’s darkest moments, there is still kindness, still courage, still hope.

Most of all, it gave me clarity.

The clarity to know when enough was enough. The strength to say no more—not because I was weak, but because I had been strong for too long. And I am worthy of peace, happiness and healing.

Final Diagnosis: Rebirth

This is not just the autopsy of my nursing career. I have hope that it’s also the beginning of something new.

I may have left the bedside, but I haven’t left my voice behind. The weight of my scrubs may be gone, but the blood, sweat, tears, stories and lessons they carried will never leave me.

I will continue to tell the stories hospitals try to silence—the long, exhausting shifts that stretch far beyond what’s safe, the whispered fears of nurses afraid to speak up, the moments of quiet devastation when we realized the system valued profit over people. I will shine a light on the realities behind closed doors—the corners cut, the burnout dismissed, the moral injuries inflicted when we were forced to choose between policy and patient care.

I will educate—not just future nurses, but the public—families who trust the system without knowing its cracks, lawmakers who make decisions without understanding the stakes, hospital executives who see numbers where nurses see human lives. Because if they truly knew what was happening, if they could feel the exhaustion, the helplessness, the betrayal, maybe things would start to change.

I will speak for the nurses still in the trenches, the ones holding the line despite the impossible weight on their shoulders. The ones who stay because they love this work, even as it breaks them. The ones who cry in supply closets, who wonder if they can make it through another shift, who question whether leaving makes them a loser or a survivor.

I will speak for the patients who deserve better—the ones who wait hours for appropriate care because there isn’t enough space or hands, the ones who slip through the cracks of a system stretched to its limits, the ones unaware of the unseen battle happening just beyond the hospital room doors.

And I will speak for the younger version of myself—the one who walked into this profession with a heart full of hope, who believed that if she just worked hard enough, gave enough, sacrificed enough, it would all be worth it. The one who didn’t understand yet that choosing herself wasn’t failure—it was survival.

The Toe Tag Reads: Freedom

When someone dies, the living don’t just walk away. They grieve. They remember. They make peace with what was. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I am not the nurse I once was. And now, with everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve learned—the toxic shift in healthcare, the hard truth of what it means to be a nurse today—I have just one thing to say:

Do. Not. Resuscitate.

For the first time in years, I don’t feel like I’m dying from the inside out. There will be no heroic measures, no frantic attempts to revive what’s already gone. This chapter is closed, and I walk away with no regrets.

Some things are meant to end.
Some things are better left to rest.