a very brief recounting of the worst day ever

Grief, I think, is the most difficult part of our job. It's not the code blues (or 99s, or whatever your particular agency or hospital calls it when a patient crumps and dies, maybe right in front of you, maybe not), because in a code situation, training takes over, and it's much easier to think of the person in front of you whose chest cartilage you are cracking with every compression as a collection of skin and bones and cells and systems that all need to work together in order to keep a body alive. And so you try to pretend that what you're doing is to save a life, which might actually be the case, but more likely you are just keeping those organs alive on the off-chance that the person you are doing cpr on is an organ donor, or maybe you're pushing drugs and pumping someone's heart and slipping on a slick of vomit on the floor for just long enough that the person's family can get to the room and say goodbye to what they still think of as a person, but who you can tell is really just a corpse.

I hate doing cpr in front of family members. I hate the after, when I'm soaked in sweat, face flushed, trying to keep the mess on my scrubs to myself, when the family comes up to me, crying, and thanks me for all I've done, and hugs me hard. I didn't do a damn thing- there's your wife/mother/sister laying on that gurney, still dead from the abdominal aortic aneurysm she had that we didn't know about until she started vomiting and then her stomach blew up like a balloon, right in front of us. I hate watching that numb and silent grief that I can't do anything about, slicking up the fingers of another dead woman with KY jelly to slip her wedding ring off to give to her mute husband, the one she'd been married to for four decades. He asked for her toe ring, too, so I pulled the blanket back and revealed bright coral colored nail polish, so incongruous on the 68 year old foot.

I can handle the dead, the dying. It's the living that stay behind that I don't know how to deal with, the ones for whom the death is such a surprise. I didn't know your mother. I didn't know your wife, or sister, except maybe to start their IV or help lift them from the ambulance and get them hooked up to our equipment, continuing a steady stream of conversation to help them feel more comfortable. And I am so sorry that what I did couldn't save them for you, even though I did everything that I could. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that I can say to the grieving to ease their loss. All I can do is mop up the shit and vomit, tuck a clean sheet around the body, pull off the gold tokens of a life together, and hand them to you before I walk out the door to sit on the back stoop and cry.

on the menu: beer and tissues

Today was the worst day ever. Ever.

it's my magnetic personality

some of you may have heard about my previous experiences with certain monitoring equipment on the ambulance and in the ER. Well. RevMedic, you'll get a kick out of this. . .I can hear you laughing all the way down the I-5 corridor.

my new position is in the fast track section of Meth Central Med Center's ER. Better hours for a single mom (I get off work while it's still light outside!), plus I'm not tempted to do things that might get me in trouble, like

brief digression:

pushing D50 on a combative diabetic patient with a CBG of 33 who is brought in by medics after causing a rather large wreck on the freeway that sends 4 other people to the trauma center and the diabetic patient to our little ER with no IV, which I manage to get, and then without thinking, grab that big fat syringe sitting bedside on the tray, and when I'm halfway through the IV push realize that while I am certified by the state I live in to paralyze patients in the field I am not allowed to push farging sugar water in the ER. Whoopsie.

end of digression

anyway. ahem. So now I work three beds with one monitor to do intake and discharge vitals on 20-30 patients a shift. I am not rough on my equipment; I treat it with respect. I don't throw it around or stomp on it or dunk it in saline. Noooooo. However, the nurse I work with informed me tonight, after replacing the SPO2 sensor for the third time this week, that I was no longer allowed to touch the damn thing.

by the way- the Zoll is back. Took them 2 months to fix it.

karma in action

if, by chance, you happen to be Meth County's eminent and most sought after car thief, and you have, in the last few months, focused much of your attention on the vehicles in the Meth Central Med Center's parking lot, and many of the vehicles you have stolen or broken into belong to Meth Central Med Center's employees, and you decide to get stabbed by a butcher knife while mumble mumble mumble mumble (the details are still a little unclear here), and the stab wound goes into your abdomen, through your liver, through your diaphragm, and into your lung, and the person who stabs you feels some remorse (and perhaps the long arm of the law tightening around their neck) and decides to dump you in the ambulance bay of an ER, where you proceed to bleed all over the asphalt and screech loudly enough to wake the dead, or at least the security guard, you may not want to be carrying your lock-picking set or threaten the caregivers attending you that they better make sure you don't die. Better yet, you may want to gently inform your assailant that the ER on the other side of town may be preferable for future stab and dumps. The compassion index might be a tad higher.

Maybe.