Share your back care stories. “… my firsthand experience”.
Hello again,
Here’s the first blog to start you off. Please feel free to contribute, I think you’d be surprised how many people are in the same boat as you.
For more than 20 years, I worked as a General Nurse in a variety of environments. Each one, big or small, hard or easy, has contributed greatly to my poor lower back strength.
I was a very good nurse, I did the manual handling training and knew the rules. But when the ‘load’ you’re lifting is a person, the unpredictability is what makes it very dangerous. Patients panic, they change their minds, they lose concentration, they move unexpectedly, they fall, they become aggressive… and that’s why nurses have such terrible back problems.
Nurses are not supposed to ‘catch’ a falling patient, of course, but when it’s a 90 year old, post operative man, what else can you do? In doing right by the patient, we do wrong by ourselves.
I wish I’d looked after my back from the start.
My back was okay when I started nursing, but I didn’t really look after it as I thought, “I’m young, I’m strong, I’m trained; that’ll be enough.” It’s not, and I now know that simple back strengthening exercises could have made all the difference; better posture could have made all the difference; a less glib attitude could have made all the difference.
NOW I look after my back and the good news is that the damage is mainly reversible. For me anyway.
