Holding My Breath

Well, I started my new job at the ER Monday. The first day I was in orientation, but the last 3 days I have been on the floor. I honestly had no idea what I was in for. What an experience this has been.
I've been doing well and picking up rather quickly, although I do put a lot of pressure on myself to get it all right, even if I have only been out there training/observing for 3 days.
I love wearing scrubs. It's the best part of the job. :)
I've seen women in labor, people bleeding, and patients vomiting at my station. It's been a crazy ride so far. And 12 hour shifts in the ER go by super fast. I never even feel like I'm there that long.
Things I hate are seeing just how much sickness there is in the world...and I'm only in 1 hospital, in 1 city, in 1 part of the country. My heart can't even fathom multiplying the numbers I see into millions and millions more.
Seeing a woman come in due to complications from her thyroid cancer and sending her back only to see her husband and their 3 young children come in an hour later looking for her all worried. Seeing a man with leukemia come in with his wife and while in the waiting room she reads him passages from The Bible. A mother crying in the waiting room because her son was just in a car accident. Seeing a daughter bring in her ill father on a stretcher and informing me that he has requested to not be resuscitated if he does pass away...
It all breaks my heart. I teared up so many times today. Once I even had to excuse myself to the restroom. I wonder if I'm truly cut out for this job?
It only gets worse too. Once I'm done training as the "Registration Specialist", I move to the back where I'll be going into patient rooms to obtain insurance information. Can I really handle doing that when a family has just lost a loved one?
I'm really worried. My heart is too big for this job.

The other thing I really hate about this job is registering people in who are in pain or concerned about their wellbeing or maybe their baby's if they are pregnant and I have to send them to the waiting room because the ER is too full. I can't tell you how many women I have seen come in within the past 3 days that are pregnant and bleeding and they sit in the waiting room almost all day and I can do nothing about it. It kills me. These young ladies walking up to me crying, holding their newly forming bellies and asking why it's taking so long and why they haven't been seen ets to me every time. They don't realize how badly I want to take them right back there and demmand that they be checked out and sent home with peace of mind. But alas, it's the ER and it goes by level of severity. (The sucky part is that every single person, understandably so, feels that they are at a high level of severity and they are really worried.)

God....I wish I could just fix it all and make it better for everyone.

So I come home to my single one-bedroom apartment, sit down at my computer, start drinking a beer, lights are out, no sound, my heart is breaking, my mind is racing and I just don't know what I'm going to do about....everything.

Life sucks and then you die.