Thirty-one years of night shifts

Dear President,

I have worked nights in hospitals for thirty-one years. I have held the hands of people dying alone because their families couldn't get off work, and I have watched my own knees and back give out lifting patients because there weren't enough of us on the floor.

When I started, I had four patients a night. Now it's often seven, sometimes eight. Nobody decided that out loud. It just crept up, one budget at a time. The young nurses I train leave within two years. I don't blame them. I would leave too if I were starting now.

I'm not writing to ask for a thank-you. We got plenty of those in 2020, and banging pots doesn't staff a ward. I'm asking for one thing: a federal minimum nurse-to-patient ratio, like the one California has had for twenty years. It works there. Patients die less. Nurses stay longer.

Please make it so the next nurse doesn't have to choose between her patients and her own body.