💔 A Nurse’s Reflection on What’s Been Sitting Heavy Lately

I haven’t written anything since Alex Pretti was killed.

I was still processing. And honestly, I didn’t think I could find the right language.

This wasn’t a sudden reaction for me. I have been upset about what has been happening in this country for a long time. I am the daughter of an immigrant. I used to live in Mexico. Before that I lived 30 miles from the DMZ that divides North and South Korea. Questions about borders, belonging, and who gets to feel safe have been personal to me for as long as I can remember.

The killing of a fellow nurse didn’t suddenly open my eyes. It pushed something that was already heavy past a threshold.

There is a story that healthcare exists outside of politics. The pandemic already disproved that. We are told we are supposed to be neutral and simply treat whoever shows up, and that what happens beyond the hospital walls is someone else’s domain.

But we don’t actually work outside of those forces. We work inside the consequences of them.

You don’t get to be neutral when you work in the realm of life and death.

We practice inside the policies that determine who has access to care and who doesn’t. We see who arrives sick, injured, exhausted, traumatized, or afraid. We see what people carry in their bodies after policies, borders, poverty, and violence have already done their work. We don’t encounter these things as abstractions. We encounter them as human beings.

I take care of veterans. People whose bodies, psyches, and lives have been shaped by conflict and by what they were asked to carry on behalf of this country. That alone has taught me that “politics” is not a debate. It is something that lives in tissue, sleep, memory, pain, and survival.

When I was an ER nurse in Southern California, I once took care of a Mexican man who was so dehydrated that he went into kidney failure. I learned that he had walked for days across the border.

I remember hanging IV fluids, watching his labs, and offering him juice over and over again because I felt so bad for him. I remember how grateful he was and how he never stopped smiling. He seemed relieved to finally be somewhere he could rest.

Not once did it occur to me to frame him as a problem. I didn’t think about legality or “the cost to taxpayers.” I thought about how much courage it must have taken to walk that far. I thought about what kind of hope someone has to carry to risk their life that way.

Later, he told me he was coming to meet his girlfriend, who was already living in California. And suddenly the whole thing looked even more human. It wasn’t a “border issue.” It was a story of love, of someone trying to reach a life that mattered to him.

That is the terrain nurses live in. Beyond policy, we get to see humanity.

We are also bound to a code of ethics that does not switch off when we clock out. We are trained to protect life, to reduce suffering, to step toward people in distress. And many of us carry that instinct into the world.

I can think of multiple moments in my life where I ran toward someone who needed help, on the street or in public, without stopping to calculate the risk. That reflex was trained into me. It came from being taught that when a human being is in trouble, you step in.

What has me shook is not just that a nurse was killed. It is that someone doing what any decent human being would do could be shot to death while trying to help. And not by a random accident. But by someone who was supposedly enforcing the law.

I never imagined that as part of the risk.

So when I say this has affected me, I mean it has unsettled something very basic. About safety. About what care exposes us to. About what it means to carry this ethic into a society that is increasingly armed, polarized, and unwell.

I am not interested in pretending that healthcare is separate from what is happening around us. We are practicing inside it. We are the ones who meet people after the world has already acted on them. 

I also don’t feel a need to make this neat and tidy. I don’t want to translate it into a coping strategy or a lesson about nervous system regulation. I don’t want to offer a way to quickly feel better about it. Some things deserve to remain uncomfortable.

I’m not expecting a resolution by writing this. I just couldn’t stay quiet in a way that could be mistaken for neutrality.

I am a nurse. I am the daughter of an immigrant. I care for veterans. I have spent years tending to people whose lives are shaped by forces far larger than any hospital. And that has been sitting very close to the surface.

This is not a polished offering. It’s simply where I am.