There are all kinds of jobs in this world, and almost all of them have their perks – and also their downsides. Some of the hardest jobs emotionally, like teachers, first responders, surgeons, have big payoffs, but sometimes we don’t hear enough about the good days.
These 18 people all have high-stress jobs, and below they’re describing one of the days they’ll never forget.
18. The light of desire.
I work physical rehab in a skilled nursing facility. I had a young, early-40s patient with a hereditary degenerative condition who had been in different hospitals and facilities for months. In addition to genuine pain and disability she was being very self-limiting–unwilling to do pretty much anything for fear of it increasing her pain levels.
Bit by bit a coworker and I convinced her to first roll over, then sit, then stand, then spend longer and longer periods out of bed. Finally, we got to the point where we were able to do a home visit, and you could see her remembering what it was like to be in her own space. That light of desire to go home was in her eyes and she worked harder from that point on, and two weeks later she was discharged.
Helping her into the car and waving it out of the parking lot was the best feeling I’ve had so far in my career.
Tl;dr: Was able to help someone go from bedridden inpatient to home in a wheelchair after months of painstaking work.
17. RIP meatball sub.
Paramedic here. My best ever job was on a hot summers day in Australia, we were called to an 11 year old boy that had drowned in his family pool. I was halfway through a foot-long meatball sub when it happened and damn near shit myself.
We were about 5 minutes away, and when we arrived the boy’s mother was providing CPR while his 8 year old twin sisters watched on, horrified. I check the carotid pulse (non-existent) and started to take over on compressions, my partner started to unpack the defib pads while our student toweled the kid off.
Defib comes back showing Ventricular Tachycardia (one of the only two shockable rhythms), so we hit him with the lightning and he instantly went back into a sinus rhythm (normal heart rhythm).
Kid then began to splutter, we rolled in him into the recovery position to help him get the water out of his lungs. In such a high octane situation, it honestly felt so good to be able to successfully revive somebody.
I still think about that job any time that I wonder why I’m in this profession.
16. Uphill from there.
There’s something about being in a hospital/nursing facility that seems like it causes learned helplessness. IDK why. When I went in for major back surgery, for the first few days I just laid there in agony and depended on my nurses for everything except going to the bathroom on my own. (Forced myself to do it cause I was to embarrassed to ask for help.)
The physical therapist came and had me walk around the floor to make sure I was okay, but beyond that I never really got out of bed. I just…didn’t want to. I wanted to lay in pain and sleep. The nurses told me I’d feel better if I walked around more but no, I just wanted to lay there and wallow. They had me stay an extra day, and when my family came to get me on the discharge day, it was like something clicked in my head. I’d been so isolated in the hospital just left by myself with nurses checking in on me occasionally that it had become the new normal for me to want to lay there and be like that. When my family showed up I realized how much I missed my normal life. That was enough for me to get up and shower on my own and get dressed. (In PJs, but still.) I was wheeled out to the parking garage and survived the ride home. When I finally got home and laid in my own bed I cried a little bit with relief.
My mom ended up bringing burger king that night and I made an intense effort to sit at the table and eat. Things went uphill from there with me walking around more, and training myself to feel normal again.
This last time I had surgery, I asked to be discharged the day after because I didn’t want to sink back into that weird helplessness again. I came home, rested, but was out of bed within days doing light chores and trying to stay active. I felt normal after the end of the first week, though I still took it easy for a few weeks afterward before the doc gave me the okay to go back to work.
So out of all of these experiences, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned how easy it is to feel helpless and isolated in a hospital if you end up having to stay. But I’ve also learned that when nurses tell you it helps to get up and move around, THEY’RE RIGHT. It’s painful, and while rehab is great to help re-train your body, it also gets you back into the right mental place where you feel almost like a normal person again and you start wanting to get back to your normal life more quickly.
I think most people would be surprised how quickly bodies can bounce back from even major surgeries. With some obvious caveats. (I wouldn’t expect someone dealing with heavy chemo to be running 5ks or whatever.) I mean I’m not saying someone should come out of back surgery and start mowing their lawn or doing heavy lifting to fix their car as soon as they get home. But the sooner you start trying to live a normal life again, it seems like the faster your body heals itself.
15. A little bit of hope.
I was a teacher in a low income-charter school, which you may recognize as a recipe for disaster.
The school was poorly run, we had to provide most supplies ourselves, and had unreasonable and unrealistic expectations placed on us. I was teaching 1st grade at the time.
We had a rule that only one child could be out of the classroom at a time, no matter what. I had 30 kids. Eventually, one of my kids had a bathroom accident (I have to say here, if I knew he had to go that bad, I would have let him go rules be damned. He never gave any indication that it was an emergency). He did his best, but 1st graders have small bladders. I got him a change of clothes and minimized his embarrassment as much as I could.
His mom was furious. She came in the next day and spent a solid 10 minutes screaming at me. A dean finally came and escorted her away and I thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. She stayed at the school the entire day and just…watched. She saw what the teachers were going through and what we had to deal with.
She came back to me at the end of the day and apologized. She was my biggest supporter from then on and if I needed something, she had it for me. On the day I quit, she hugged me and told me that I was too good for that place and it was her son’s last day too.
Obviously, I’ve had better days than that in my career, but that was a day that gave me hope and helped me not give up my career due to one bad school.
14. A sweet rescue.
We saved a couple of kids stuck in a locked warehouse. It made my day seeing their faces after we had rescued them.
13. No emergencies to be seen.
Medic here, best day on the job was my “no hitter”, not a single call in 14 hours. Glorious day that was.
12. The best one of the bunch.
I was a dispatcher for a residential alarm company similar to ADT. I would call people when their alarm was tripped and ask them if they were okay.
One day I received a signal from a residence from a glass break sensor on a window in the bathroom. When i called the lady was laughing so hard she could barely give me her safety password.
Turns out she was cleaning her bathroom and when she bent over she farted so hard and loud it set off the sensor on the bathroom window.
11. It is a big deal.
Policeman in small town. Got a call to try and locate a woman who was on the heart transplant list. She wasn’t answering her phone or pager. Early 90’s and she didn’t have a cell phone.
It was in the middle of the night and cold in the middle if Feb. I knocked on the door of every neighbour on her culdesac without success. Last house on Culdesac which was across the street told me she’d gone to her mother’s out of town. Was able to get her number and contact her. She got a new heart that night.
I’m retired now and still she her on occasion. She always makes a big deal and hugs me. She’d forgotten her pager and didn’t go back to get it thinking what are the chances they’ll call tonight……
10. It mattered.
Bear with me— I was a case manager for mentally ill adults. I knew things were tough for this lady, we’ll call her Z. She and I were in our mid 20’s. When I showed up for our meeting, she had a clear hand shaped bruise on her face. And bruises around her neck. She cried when she saw my face, reacting. Neighbors had called the police. They made him leave, but said it was “he said, she said”. She needed a clearer report to get to a shelter on an emergency basis.
She was scared, but we went down to the precinct to make a report. On the way, I wanted to buy her breakfast. Z started crying again, because it was hard for her to decide what she wanted because she was so unused to making even that small choice. Oh, and she told me that he had raped her once he came back after the police later that night….
The desk officer initially said that he couldn’t do anything, because the report said that it was purely verbal. I am an angry crier, so I then burst into tears and angrily tell him to LOOK at the fucking HANDPRINT on her face and the bruises on her neck. I tell him more quietly that there is more….. He gets a DV specialist, and a chief from the county happened to be there. And he happened to be a family friend. And he fixed things. We got the right report. And I take Z off to a hospital.
I call work to tell them what’s going on and ask them to cancel the rest of my day. My supervisor has the fucking nerve to tell me not to get too invested because I know that it’s likely she’ll just go back. I hung up on her. I had no idea, but a co-worker over heard this and went to our director.
I sat in the ER with Z and made plans for her future. What she wanted for dinner, what color blanket she would want for her new room. What her dream vacation would be. I held her hand while they did the rape kit.
Throughout the day I had been calling and working with a DV shelter. They picked her up from the hospital and promised me they had clothes and bedding for her. I went home and cried and cried.
The next day I was ready to escalate to my director, but found she already knew. She had flowers and apologies for me. My supervisor gave me a full apology as well.
Z never went back. I ran into her, and her very nice husband and adorable son about 10 years after. She had gotten her GED. She was working on her BA. She was safe.
On my very bad no good days when I am just destroyed, I remember that day. I was young and it was so hard and she was so hurt and broken. We kept going, together. It mattered.
9. A magic time.
I used to work as a janitor in a high school. There were three of us in the school and during the summer break, we were normally given a list of jobs to do, but we were mainly just expected to show up and be on hand if we were needed.
This one year, we finished all our work super early into the break, so we had practically nothing to do. One day, I was sitting in a classroom watching movies on my phone, when my friend radioed me and asked me to come to the roof. Bearing in mind we were the only people on staff authorised to access the roof.
I went up and walked outside, it was a beautiful, sunny day. My friend had set up some chairs from a classroom and had a bucket of ice with some beers floating in it. We spent the whole day up on the roof sunbathing and drinking.
It was a magic time.
8. Pay more attention.
I was a SAHM, with four children, ages 8, 4, 3 and 1. You can imagine how crazed my life could be. One day, we were over at my mother-in-law’s house for Sunday dinner, and I had left the kids with the family so I could run to the store to get butter or rolls, some small thing to go with dinner.
When I came back, my mother-in-law said, “Did you see how your kids’ faces lit up the second you walked in the door?” I hadn’t seen anything. But the next time the situation came up, I paid attention this time. And she was right! I was so busy being Crazy Harassed Mom with Too Much to Worry About that I was missing it: my kids adored me, and I wasn’t seeing it.
Trust me, after that, I paid a lot more attention.
7. What a relief.
Very early in my career as a criminal defense attorney, I had a black college student charged with a shooting. It was getting a lot of media statewide due to one of the people involved being a professional athlete. After investigating, I became convinced that he was innocent and the actual shooter was probably one of the state’s primary witnesses. I had only had a few jury trials at that point and they all were defendants that were guilty as hell but refused to plead out. I didn’t have a ton of faith in either a jury or my own ability to handle the case/consequences.
I worked my ass off in preparation. Once we started trial, I realized I was knocking down every piece of evidence that the state was presenting. I was pumped with adrenaline and growing confidence. I tore up their star witness, who I thought was probably the actual shooter. One of the jurors actually laughed at the guy in disbelief of some of the things he was testifying to. I gave a thirty minute closing argument without even looking at my notes with the jury nodding along to everything I was saying. They were out 20 minutes and came back with a not guilty verdict. Front page news article in the biggest papers in the state. Client’s mom is hugging me a crying with relief in one of the photos.
That guy still calls me up once a year to check in. Married, kids, solid white collar job. I always think of that case when I start to have doubts about doing defense work.
6. Glorious.
I work as a police officer in a fairly busy city. At the end of a normal 10.4 hour night it’s not uncommon to have 12 calls in my history. Sometimes as many as 15-18.
Last year in January it snowed. I sat under an overpass and did not have to move from the time I signed on, until sign off. Not a single call.
Glorious.
5. It changed her life.
Psychologist here:
I did my year-long internship at a university counseling center. While we normally only saw clients for 8-12 sessions, we were allowed to have one longer-term client to give us more experience. Mine ended up being this wonderful young woman who was deeply depressed. She was an identical twin. Sessions were slow going at first and there were a lot of tears. She worked through a lot and she was much better by the end of our ~10 months working together. My supervisor and I talked about her frequently and she watched tapes of our sessions.
The next year I was on my post-doc and I got a call from my former supervisor who had just started seeing my client’s twin in private practice. The mother of the two, not knowing who my supervisor was, started talking to her about how her other daughter had gone to therapy and how her therapist had changed her life.
My supervisor called me to tell me this because, as she well knows, we don’t get to hear that very often.
4. A really good vibe.
On my boss’ birthday, people decided to have a cake for him, kind of a suprise party, when he got onto the room where the surprise was, he started laughing and blushing, then all of my co-workers started chatting and joke about stuff and the cake itself was pretty delicious.
That day had a really good vibe, and that kind of situation is one of the reasons why i like my job.
3. Without a single hiccup.
I’d been designing this machine along with a mechanical engineer. I’d designed the controls for it and was reasonably sure it would be ok, maybe a few bugs to work out, but the code seemed stout enough.
We powered the unit up, went through the setup cycle and went through the manual cycle. It worked perfectly.
The ME said, “let’s try Auto.” It worked without a single hiccup.
That afternoon, a project I’d spent almost two months straight on ran it’s first product.
The cool thing: the place I worked had a “development clause” for engineering. When you came up with an expansion or engineering plan, it was more or less written in stone. If you went over the date, you were shuffled down the project list. But if you finished before the date, they had a cool little feature.
Every profit from that machine from the date it ran production until your scheduled end date was split up between the people who worked on it, since the company figured that money was a bonus anyway. We’d started production almost a month before our scheduled finish.
I paid off a car and bought a motorcycle.
2. It was meant to be.
I’m a physician. Some years ago, I was a resident on obstetrics on my FIRST DAY, FIRST HOUR of my shift and I watched a pregnant woman almost die and give birth to a baby boy that ended up dying shortly after due to the complications of childbirth. The boy required extensive resuscitation – it was my first time seeing a “code” on a child, let alone a newborn. However, he ended up with severe brain damage and was eventually taken off life support in the NICU.
It was their third round of IVF, and the previous two rounds had failed. It was one of those very unfortunate stories where nothing could have been done – maybe if the woman had presented earlier, but unfortunately, despite emergency surgery, it was too late. Thankfully, the mother survived with no health consequences, but it was emotionally devastating for everyone involved. Multiple nurses were agonizing whether they had done something wrong, my attending had told me to expect a lawsuit. Thankfully, it never materialized.
But, that was probably the worst day I’ve ever had on the job. And yet, half an hour later we had to move on and stitch up a vaginal tear on a woman who kept b**ching about how she “had been waiting for three hours already!!!!” but we couldn’t tell her just WHY she waited. So we just apologized profusely for our troublesome tardiness and kept smiling.
Two years later, I was on pediatrics in the same hospital and I was examining a prematurely born infant that was a few months old. As the mom and I were fiddling with the baby, I noticed the mom had a tattoo of a boy’s name and a date below it on her wrist. I looked at the date and realized it was the first day of my residency training.
I immediately had chills come over me. I debated for a minute whether it was inappropriate for me to ask that, but I went ahead and asked the mom “Did you, by any chance, lose a baby boy at this hospital on X date?” She said “Yes” and I told her I was the resident who first examined her. We talked about her traumatic experience, as she teared up and said that after that, she couldn’t fathom getting pregnant, or even setting foot on the maternity ward, ever again.
Eventually, she said her and her husband came to the realization that they were ready to consider adoption and listed themselves in a North American registry. Then she said one day she got a call saying there was a severely premature newborn available some 3000 miles away. It was an abandoned crack addict’s baby that was left at a fire station.
She said they didn’t think twice and booked the flight to go and get the baby. They went through the adoption process and the baby was now thriving, several months old, developing well, and cared for by a loving family. She said she felt that her and this baby were meant to find each other after both traveling these extremely difficult paths.
It was probably the most heartwarming story I’ve ever come across and it was so relieving to hear that this woman (and the abandoned baby) all found their happy endings. So, I would say it was my best day on the job.
1. Her last night on earth.
Nurse here. I was a student on a cardiac unit and there was a lady there waiting for surgery. She and her husband spoke little English, although their friend was there sometimes to help translate. The night before her surgery her husband and friend left and I helped her take a sanitizing shower to prep for the next day. My preceptor told me her surgery was extremely risky and carried only a 20% chance of success. Neither of us were sure if she understood this fully, but she knew it was necessary and she was scared.
I kept thinking it might be her last night on earth and she was here all alone. Through broken communication her last words to me that night were her thank yous because she said we were so sweet and caring in a time when she was so afraid. I didn’t care whether I was allowed or not, but I gave her a strong hug before I left that night. On the eve of surgery she was all alone, regular hospital meal, with little ability to communicate. I left with a terrible sadness.
I was relieved when I did see her the next week when she demanded more hugs and asked why I wasn’t her nurse again.
There are days we see someone for the last time, and sometimes we never find out. Then there are days when things go well and people remember the kindness they received instead of their fear.
Wow. I could honestly scroll through these forever. How about you?
If you have a high-stress job, we’d love it if you would add your story in the comments!
