From Empathy to Exhaustion - On Becoming Jaded in Healthcare

When I first started working as a medical scribe in the emergency room, I saw everything through fresh eyes. The adrenaline, the urgency, the impact - every case mattered. Every symptom was a mystery to be solved, every patient a life in need of saving. I wanted to take it all in, to learn, to help. And I did...for a while.

But over time, something began to shift. Slowly, subtly. The days blurred. The traumas piled up. The stories overlapped. You start mentally counting how many deaths you've seen and after 200, it's hard to remember where you left off. What once felt like a calling started to feel like a cycle. It was all very predictable, relentless, and emotionally expensive. I didn’t stop caring, but I started to feel the distance growing between who I was when I walked into the ER for the first time and who I had become.

One of the hardest days I’ve ever had came in the form of a 3-month-old baby who had had arrested due to suspected SIDS. We ran the code the moment she hit the trauma bay. While doing chest compressions, we had one finger on her tiny chest. One finger. That’s all it took to push against her sternum, over and over, trying to bring her back. I will never forget how her cold skin felt under my glove. I will never forget the stillness. We worked, we tried, we hoped. But she didn’t make it.

Afterwards, I stepped into the hallway and stared at the wall. Not crying. Not breaking down. Just… blank. And that scared me. Because part of me thought, “Shouldn’t I be feeling more?”

That’s the thing about working in healthcare, especially in emergency medicine. The very thing that makes you good at it, being able to act in crisis, to push emotion aside for the sake of focus, is also what starts to wear on you. You go into the field because you care deeply, but that caring starts to cost you. You become efficient. You become focused. You become tired. And sometimes, if you’re not careful, you become jaded.

I used to think jadedness was a flaw, a kind of moral failure. But I’m starting to see it differently. It's not that you don’t care; it’s more like you’ve cared for so long, with so little room to process the weight of it all. It’s cumulative. The babies. The overdoses. The murders even. The patients who scream at you. The ones who come back again and again, stuck in cycles that medications alone can’t fix. And still, you show up.

And maybe that’s the quiet kind of resilience we don’t talk enough about in healthcare. Not the heroics. Not the adrenaline. But the simple act of showing up again the next day, even when you’re tired, even when your heart feels heavy, even when you feel like you’ve got nothing left to give.

What I’ve learned is that becoming jaded doesn’t mean you’ve lost your compassion. It means you’ve been exposed to the full spectrum of what it means to be human, at our worst, at our most broken, at our most vulnerable, and you’ve survived it. But surviving isn’t enough. We also have to heal. We have to find ways to reconnect with the part of ourselves that got us here in the first place.

Because in a field that can harden you, choosing to stay soft is the real strength. And sometimes, all it takes is one patient, one quiet moment, one hope of a heartbeat beneath your fingertip, to remind you why you started.