The wonderful thing about nursing is that you can move around to other departments when you feel you are burning out. Unfortunately, many nurses do not recognize that they have burnt out and you will be forced to work with them. You will not be dealing with death every day. You will see it more often in areas like the ER and an oncology or cardiac unit. Taking care of yourself is very important no matter where you work or what patients you are dealing with. Some time ago I posted a discussion on compassion fatigue. Pull that up and take a look at it. I believe I posted it under Nurse Talk. There or under Ask A Nurse is where you need to look for it. The search on this site has been acting crappy lately so you may have to just plow through all of the topics to find it. If I saved it to disk, I will repost if you have problems finding it.  

I ditto (cdnurse's reply).....that the beauty of nursing is that there are sooo many areas we can branch off into and explore if you get burned out in a particular area. I have worked with some nurse ratchetts who were either burned out and needed to move to a different area or they did not have hearts to be nurses in the first place.

jc