Right now, 15,000 nurses in New York City are on the picket lines. While the headlines talk about wages and benefits, there is a deeper, more chilling demand at the heart of this strike: Workplace safety and violence protections.

​For anyone who hasn’t lived in a hospital for weeks at a time, this might sound like a formality. But for those of us who have, it’s a matter of life and death.​

During my long stays on different hospital floors, I saw it all. I experienced hospitals that felt like fortresses and others that felt like open revolving doors. I remember lying in those beds, staring out the window in a drug-induced fog, drifting in and out of a weird, medicated state. In those moments, I would have flashes (visions that felt like horror movies) of someone breaking into the ward and massacring us while we were too weak to even sit up.​

My brain at the time couldn’t fully process the fear. I’d mask it with quick-witted jokes: “Yikes, any Joe Schmo could come walking into my room at any time, huh?” But now, with my vision clear and the fog of battle lifted, I look back at those unsafe floors and realize my “nightmares” weren’t just hallucinations. They were a rational response to an irrational lack of security.​

When nurses are spread too thin, when hospital entrances are unsecured, and when “patient safety” is sacrificed for the bottom line, the most vulnerable people on earth are left exposed.​

The things these nurses are fighting for shouldn’t be “negotiables.” They should be mandatory. We shouldn’t have to “raise hell” from a cancer bed just to feel safe while we fight for our lives.​

Nurses are fighting for safety because they know what I felt from that bed: When a hospital isn’t a sanctuary, it’s a horror movie waiting to happen.

​I stand with the NYSNA nurses. Because a hospital should be a safe place, not a place where patients and staff have to look over their shoulders.

Signed,

Midwest Millennial Mama