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.