I have found that I have strong feelings about entertainment these days. I was super excited when the commercials for my favorite shows started showing up. More seasons were headed my way. I was excited for the sweet blissful escape of zoning out in front of a tv show where I can pretend all is right in the world for 30-60 minutes at a time. It wasn’t all that shocking, albeit disappointing, to find that almost every show I watch was now based on Covid 19.
I can’t say I’m a fan. Even before I started working in the hospital, the last thing anyone wanted was for their escape from reality to get tainted with current events. Now that I live the reality every day I’m at work {and lets be honest, any and every day}, the last thing I want is to rehash reality in some twisted form or another. It’s not like Hollywood stays neutral {insert eye roll here}. There is so much talk about self care and finding ways to cope with stress. I’ve come to the conclusion that anything we do is only a finger plugging a leak in a dam of emotions. It’s a temporary fix that just buys time until a long-term solution is found. It’s a day to day struggle to maintain some semblance of sanity, even if that means two steps forward and then two right on back. Don’t get me wrong, self care is vital, especially when it is aimed at ensuring our immune systems stay running at full force. Or really, just ensuring we have the gumption to get up and do it all over again.
The more I think about it, the more I see the other side of my disdain for Covid permeating my pretend world of happiness. I didn’t understand the strain fully until I was smack dab in the middle of it. I can only imagine how foreign the exhaustion is to those who don’t see it, who don’t experience the overwhelming surge of patients who literally have nowhere to go in the hospital and yet still come. Perhaps these shows depicting exhausted healthcare workers, struggling to the perfect soundtrack, saying goodbye to patients and colleagues for the last time; watching their own people get taken down, one by one by the same disease that is killing their patients, might just open the eyes of the unbelievers.
It still shocks me when I see people refuse to wear a mask. To refuse to avoid large crowds. I’em not saying to become hermits and never leave your home, I have traveled myself to see my family as safely as we possibly could, but there are things that can be done to prevent or slow the insanity. I guess my hope is that those that also watch these shows that may not know firsthand how exhausting it is, might be moved to consider someone other than themself. Perhaps it will stir their emotions enough to contemplate how the other side of their argument feels. After all, there is a long history of our entertainment presenting and normalizing topics that were once well, taboo. {Let’s hear it for Archie and Edith}
For now, I will continue to watch my favorite poorly scripted medical shows that are set around world events that I want to escape from and follow along until the tidy, if not inaccurate, happiness at the end of the episode all while hoping it can help bring awareness to the masses.
The Diary of a Mad Nursing Student *Turned ER Nurse* 