save a life

The days I forget my armor are the worst. . .when the dregs of humanity
fill the waiting room coated with a slick of dirt and sweat and desperation,
the running joke of “save a life today?” plays out every time I start an IV
for a migraine or a toothache and the junkies line up to have their abscesses drained
without pain medication because even if I could find a vein, anything the doctors could give them isn’t nearly as strong as the heroin they injected with their dirty needles. I don’t
expect to walk into a room after a particularly bad drainage, blood and pus all over
the floor, scrawny junkie whimpering on the bed, and feel anything but the usual
businesslike disgust of caring for yet another slow suicide.
But I surprise myself, and I start crying. Not terribly good patient care, I
suppose, but there you go. And as I finish taping the gauze over the hole
in his flesh, the junkie grabs my wrist with his other hand and says “thank you”
and promises to get clean. I look him straight in the eye, tell him he's lying, dare him
to prove me wrong
Guess it doesn’t matter what he said after that, because a week or a month
or a year from now, it’ll be his body on the gurney the medics bring in,
CPR in progress, his eyes fixed and staring, code called after five minutes of
definitive care in the hospital.
My friend Luke wrote me last night from work: “One of my patients just passed. . .what
a strange job we have. . .time goes so fast you know and there is just no way
to go back. . .sometimes I wonder what the hell I am doing. . .am I leaving
the world better than I found it. . .”
And I remember, again, “did you save a life today?” and the code we had
last week, 76 year old guy in town to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary with
his family. . . I did compressions for 10 minutes, sweat pouring down my face and back, while the doctor pushed every possible drug and the man’s wife waited in a wheelchair
in the lobby
I looked at his face. . .what was I thinking, I never do that, dangerous when you’re breaking someone’s ribs trying to push their blood to the rest of their body, dangerous
to think of them as a person instead of a collection of cells and blood and systems
that all need to work together to be a life. . .it haunted me, his face did, but I don’t
know now if I could tell you what he looked like.

and I’m wondering, really, if I’m saving anybody’s life but mine