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A nurse's workplace is being bashed online for sending a "thank you" card for her large amounts of mandatory overtime—but the card was addressed to her husband, thanking him for "sharing her."
The original poster, u/SolitudeWeeks, shared an image of the card along with an explanation in her post to the popular Reddit forum r/antiwork, earning 26,500 upvotes and 2,000 comments in 11 hours for her post, "A thank you note from my job to my husband for my mandatory overtime."
"Dear [Husband's Name], Thank you for sharing your wife, [u/SolitudeWeeks], as she has been mandated to work several times over the past few months. We certainly recognize that this took her away from her family. Please know we appreciate her and thank you for sharing when we desperately needed her," the card reads.
The OP says that while mandatory overtime used to result in a fine for the hospital, that rule was suspended at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, many nurses were forced to stay an extra four to eight hours after their shift normally ended.
"After a particularly bad week, my HUSBAND got a thank you care for 'sharing' me from the hospital," u/SolitudeWeeks wrote.
In a comment, she added that she also posted the image of the card to her Facebook profile, where a "local nurse influencer" found it, making it go viral in the nursing community. Her workplace's Chief Nursing Officer found out about the card and stopped management from sending any more out.
"They had to access my emergency contacts to find out who to 'properly' thank. It was more of a slap in the face than the $10 giftcards they gave out but quickly ran out of," u/SolitudeWeeks added.
She also says that there's no reward for working mandatory overtime, and that overtime only kicks in after the 80th hour across two weeks.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been very hard on nurses and other health care professionals. In October, while enrollment in nursing schools was up, nurses were quitting the industry in droves due to the stress of dealing with COVID-19—dying patients, harassment from COVID deniers and the "frustration" over some of the deaths' preventability. Some nurses that stayed on reported "compassion fatigue" during the worst spikes of the disease.
Another study showed that 40 percent of nurses said they were planning on quitting the industry. Despite the increased burnout, average wages have remained stagnant at $35 per hour. And though there are options available for nurses in need of help with their mental health, Diana Calthorpe Rose and Sharon Salzberg of the Garrison Institute and Insight Meditation Society, respectively, say that though groups like Helping Healers Heal are being formed to help, "support networks remain few and thin."
"The CDC guidelines recommend self-care techniques like taking breaks, getting enough sleep and meditating," Rose and Salzberg write. "Easier said than done. A nurse working a double shift, sacrificing her break to stay at the bedside of a dying patient, can hardly follow such advice consistently. What she needs is a self-care resource she can use in short increments when she gets a spare minute, which can be scaled up until it's available to millions of health care workers like her."
And nurse burnout has real consequences for patients too. Last September, a 70-year-old woman died after waiting in the ER of a hospital for six hours; two-thirds of the hospital's nursing staff had quit or transferred.
"It's hard. I don't want to blame anybody, because obviously, these things happen to people. And that's not really what it's about for us right now anyways. It's just about obviously grieving our mother. Just in general, we're also hoping and praying this doesn't happen to someone else," the woman's daughter told reporters.
Redditors were disgusted that the card was addressed to u/SolitudeWeeks' husband for "sharing her," rather than to the nurse who actually did all the hard work.
"They really view us as property, don't they?" u/juicyjules_24 wrote.
"Yes, they do. I have a newspaper clipping from 2005 where the VP for a company I worked for at the time did an interview regarding 'terror attacks.' The VP said, almost verbatim, 'we have built a company infrastructure that would allow us to re-build, re-staff, and re-open in less than one month after a catastrophic event such as a terrorist attack at one of our locations,'" u/crapgarbage replied. "I cut the article out and brought it in to my manager, asking him what his thoughts were. His response was 'that article was aimed at stockholders.' That was an eye-opening moment for me."
"I'm betting somebody in the office either comes from military or got the idea from military. The military does this when people deploy, I get a card in the mail from my husband's commanding officer every time he deploys and it feels weird as hell every time," u/flyfightwinMIL
"Literally speaking about her as if she is a piece of property," u/SatanIsLove6666 wrote.
Newsweek reached out to u/SolitudeWeeks for comment.
About the writer
Matt Keeley is a Newsweek editor based in Seattle. His focus is reporting on trends and internet culture. He has ... Read more