I'm so overwhelmed, and I just need to talk it out **Update

I found this in NO WAY offensive. And it is a huge part of what I am struggling with.

First I will say that in my career, I work with end of life care/palliative/comfort care cases very frequently. And I am often dealing first hand with with death and everything that comes with it.

However, with that said, the way my dad's region does organ allocation, he had to be within this "Two week window" for transplant, which means they had determined he had two weeks or less to live. And I'd get there every morning at 7:00am and think to myself, HE NEEDS HOSPICE. He is ACTIVELY DYING right in front of me. I will spare the details but it was awful and I had readied myself for him to die, even though I was advocating and fighting every single second to keep him alive and to keep his spirits up. It was like a roller-coaster of emotions from hell. We couldn't keep him comfortable because he had to be as aware and focused as possible. He was on 24/7 dialysis. He was out of his mind because the ammonia levels were through the roof and they would be calling me 2:00am to come back to the hospital to calm him or reorient him.

And when the transplants finally happened I was so relieved, but no one had prepared us for afterwards. The delirium, the feelings that he was "recovered" even though he had 170 staples in his abdomen and couldn't understand why he couldn't drive, or cook or anything else. It was a long process.

And you've hit it exactly right on the head... we went through all of this... and at some point, just like everyone one else on the planet, he will die. And I will relive all these emotions that I've already lived through once. And I can't even think about it now because... he's healthy and I have patients to care for that are dying and I must be as positive and advocate for them at the same level that I did previous to all of this.

Before my dad got sick my SO was diagnosed with stage 3 thyroid cancer with mets. And we were just getting past that when all this started with my dad (He had a surgery go horribly wrong which caused all these complications requiring the transplants) so it just feels like the last two years have been all about caring for everyone non-stop and I guess I just lost myself somewhere along the way. But I'm on a mission to find and care for myself starting today.

Thank you.