Art is a portal to emotional health.

Michelle is an Operating Room Nurse and self-taught artist. After several years of working at a trauma hospital, she developed nightmares and symptoms of PTSD. She credits art, EMDR therapy, and psychedelics with healing her burnout.

From her book What Happened to Our Circulating Nurse? :

I develop nightmares sometime between my 4th and 5th year working as a nurse. A wide variety of destruction, pain, and death. Morbid scenes of me killing my patients, my patients killing me.

In my waking life, I struggle to talk about my complicated feelings about working in healthcare. I feel grateful to be doing meaningful work, grateful for a career with plenty of demand, yet I think I'm miserable, stumbling on all the frustrations and red tape of a broken system, working alongside equally burned out nurses, doctors, and scrub techs.

I find moments of relief after I quit my job, after months of EMDR therapy, and when I'm making art.

This book of words and paintings is small but heavy. It explores my burnout and all the questions that I know I can't be the only one asking. There is fear, despair, powerlessness, and frustration.

But there is also humor, curiosity, and so much pride in being a surgical nurse.

With a bit of bite, humor, and gore, Michelle takes us down the rabbit hole of her nightmares and daydreams, exploring nurse bullying, workplace violence, and the morbidity of medicine.