After working close to 20 years in this medical-surgical ICU, I thought I was an expert. Infallible. I could do it all.

I left my ICU comfort zone, my lifelong nurse friends, and ventured out. Nothing could stop me.

For a different hospital system, I became a critical care resource nurse.

This very large hospital system would dictate what unit I would go to and for how long. I truly thought I could handle anything.

This manager, over the resource nurses, said I would go to the surgical-trauma ICU. Little did I know, this was the mammoth of ICUs. It should have been named “Tragedies and Heartbreak ICU.”

After 6 grueling months of this, I said “never again.”

In effect, I was traumatized.

Every day, every hour was an event that would rubber stamp my brain with PTSD.

The 400-pound man riding a mini-bike and toppled over face first and now forever paralyzed from the neck down.

The young college girl who had a fight with her boyfriend and jumped from her dorm room, five stories down to her death. I received her in this surgical-trauma ICU. Though the surgical-trauma MD refused to pronounce her. “Two chest tubes first,” he would scream to his residents. A perfect porcelain face and beautiful long black hair with internal organs crushed. Chest tubes in and he pronounced.

Waiting for her mother to arrive. I expected blood-curdling screams. But mom was silent as she sat next to her dead daughter. A catatonic silence. The sacred silence.

The 600-pound man on the ventilator. I gave him a much-needed bath since he had been neglected by fellow nurses for days. When it came time to turn him I asked the charge nurse to help round up some help to turn him, so I could finish his bath, and she laughed at me. “Good luck with that,” and she turned and walked away.

The 18-year-old, motorcycle, drugs, no helmet, head-on collision to the wrong lane. Killing an innocent driver. C1-C3 fractures. Paralyzed neck down. Brain damage. His mom called every morning, 0500, in her shaky broken voice, asking if her son was better.

Trauma after trauma and I couldn’t keep up. I would tremble walking toward the employee exit after I clocked out.

I met a few kind nurses who would give me words of encouragement, but this was such a large hospital and such a large surgical-trauma unit that we all just became a number. A number of existence.

The manager wanted to renew my contract after 6 months. I politely told her no. No thank you. Never again.

Hats off to those health care professionals who do this incredible relentless trauma nursing. There was good and there was bad and there was the invisible.

But I couldn’t survive this arena. This assembly line of constant trauma and deaths and near deaths. After 6 months I said never again.

Of the few ICUs I had worked in my nursing lifetime, this one was the most difficult.

I would try to push the sad and tragic events and tuck them away forever. But that doesn’t happen.

Debbie Moore-Black is a nurse who blogs at The Critical Care Nurse.