They say grief comes in waves, and I think that’s true of the hard days too.
Working at Connaught sometimes feels like riding a roller coaster blindfolded. There are moments of hope and breakthrough, but lately… it’s felt heavy. Really heavy. The last month has been filled with some long, difficult days that seem to blur into one another, each one layered with its own weight, its own heartbreak.
And it’s not that I haven’t experienced hard shifts before. I’ve worked back home in busy, high-pressure hospitals, juggling too many patients, managing codes, supporting grieving families, and walking out of the ward emotionally drained and physically wrecked. I’ve held the hand of a dying patient and comforted their loved ones, all while trying to keep pace with protocols, alarms, and expectations. Those shifts were intense, heartbreaking, and at times overwhelming.
But Connaught… it’s different.
Here, the challenges cut deeper, not because the patients are sicker, but because the safety nets I took for granted simply don’t exist. It’s not just short-staffed; it’s under-resourced in ways that force impossible decisions. It’s knowing what to do, how to help, but being unable to.
The hard days here don’t just leave me tired, they leave me changed.
A “difficult day” here doesn’t just mean being busy or overwhelmed. It means standing over a patient who is dying because we’ve run out of oxygen. It means trying to resuscitate someone with an ambu bag that has holes in it, knowing full well it’s not going to work the way it should. It means watching a patient die not because we lacked skill or care, but because he couldn’t afford the emergency supplies for the surgery that might have saved his life.
It means holding the body of a baby, his chest still, after hours of trying to bring him back, knowing that if he had received care just a little earlier, he might have lived. But the nurses were stretched too thin. The health system failing him before he even had a chance.
These moments stay with you. They don’t dissolve with the end of a shift. They sit in your chest, they wake you at night, they change the way you pray.
At home, we fight to give our best care within a structure that mostly supports us. Here, we fight for the basics, gloves, medications, running water, electricity, and we still lose patients we might have saved anywhere else. The grief feels heavier because it’s laced with injustice. The exhaustion hits harder because it’s tangled with helplessness. And the victories, when they come, feel monumental, because we know exactly what it took to get there.
I’m writing this not for sympathy, but for honesty. I love my job, deeply. I believe in this work with every part of who I am. But it’s not always easy. And I don’t always know what to do with the things I carry.
When I return to the ship after a day at Connaught and someone asks me, “How was your day?” sometimes all I can manage is “fine.” Not because that’s the truth, but because I don’t know how to translate what I’ve seen into words that won’t overwhelm or burden the person asking. Sometimes I want to scream or cry or just be held in silence, but instead, I smile. I shrug. I tuck it all away.
I’ve always prided myself on being strong. Independent. The joyful one. The helper. The one who listens. I’ve carried that identity like armor. But what I’m learning, slowly and painfully, is that strength doesn’t mean silence. It doesn’t mean carrying everything alone.
Over the past few months, I’ve built habits that help me cope, journaling, praying, reading Scripture, writing out what I can’t say out loud. Those tools have become lifelines. But I’ve also realized something deeply important: I need to talk. Writing helps me process, yes. But I’m a talker. I need to say it out loud. I need to be witnessed.
This week, I finally reached out to chaplaincy. I sat down and let the words spill out. Some came easily, others broke as they came. But by the end of that session, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: relief. Not because the pain had gone. But because it had been shared. Because someone had looked me in the eyes and said, “That’s heavy. I see you. You’re not alone.”
And that’s what I’m learning: I can’t do this alone. The work I do is sacred. But it is also brutal at times. And trying to carry it without support is not noble, it’s dangerous. Without space to speak, to cry, the grief bottles up. It festers. It waits to explode. And I’ve lived long enough to know the damage that can do.
I’m learning that needing help isn’t weakness. That asking for space to process is not indulgent, it’s necessary. That vulnerability isn’t a crack in my foundation, it is the foundation.
So I’m giving myself permission now.
To ask for help.
To lean on others.
To say “I’m not okay today” and let that be enough.
Because strength, I’m realizing, doesn’t come from holding it all together.
It comes from letting someone else hold it with you.
AYLA IN AFRICA 