THE GUARDIAN – All Tristin Kate Smith ever wanted to do was help people.
As a high school student, she enrolled in a neighboring school district in order to help older adults in nursing homes.
But bit by bit, life as an emergency nurse for the 28-year-old Ohio native deteriorated.
When she and her colleagues told hospital management of their work struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic, including long hours and insufficient support, they were told to enroll in online courses.
“The compliments, the pizzas, the ‘thank you’ letters gradually had less meaning to me,” she wrote in a letter titled Letter To My Abuser last March.
“You ignore us while we beg on our hands and knees. We get a pizza party and free pens for being ‘healthcare heroes’.”
Tristin wrote how she lived in constant fear of someone walking into the facility she worked at with a gun and shooting the place up.
In July, her father, Ron Smith, found her dead in her home from a self-inflicted injury.
“She told me she would cry before she went to work,” he said. “Sometimes she would even get physically sick.
“She’d tell me: ‘Dad, there is no help.’ She said the only breaks she’d get were when she’d grab her sandwich on the way to the bathroom and get a few bites. I told her she needed to start thinking about a different career.”
Tristin’s struggles with working in healthcare went viral after Smith published her letter in an Ohio newspaper in October.
But Tristin was far from alone. Female nurses in America take their own lives at nearly twice the rate of the wider female population. Harassment of health workers has more than doubled since 2018 …
