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Nurse Stories, Part Eighteen: Trying To Make Sense Of It All...(By Genevieve M. Voisin, R.N.) by Karen Lynn Vidra, The Texas Tornado
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Rated "PG" by the Author.
A nurse tries to accept the bad along with the good in her job as charge nurse.
No matter how many times it happens, and no matter how often I have had to help out, I can never get used to the fact that people end up dying despite our best efforts to try to save their life.
It happened again today. A lady was in a bad car wreck, and she was horribly injured: internal injuries and bleeding, multiple fractures of her limbs, closed head injury, poor response to pain stimuli, and looking more dead than alive when she was brought by ambulance into the E.R. She was a very heavy, black woman, and no matter what we did or tried to do to get her to respond, she just would not do a goddamn thing, and she was just too far gone when we got to her. She must have weighed at least 500 pounds, and it took all of us to get her big, beefy form onto the treatment table, and it was hard to establish an I.V. line or try to get a pulse from her because she was so big. Apparently, some jerkules ran a red light just as her car was strarting to cross the median strip, and from the way this woman looked, the other person must have been traveling at a very high rate of speed when he struck the woman's car. She was in a horrible state of affairs, and it took all of our skills and knowhow to try to revive her; but to no avail.
The woman was married, and was in her fifties, and her husband came to the E.R. when he was notified of his wife's accident. Her name was Mona, and she and her husband, Stanley, had four kids, all girls, all grown. She was diabetic, had high blood pressure, and other health problems, and she was just fixin' to retire from her job as a postal worker when she was involved in the wreck earlier today, and she died despite our best efforts to try to save her.
We also lost an elderly woman who was terminal (she had cancer), but unlike the heavy black woman, we did not beat her up trying to get life back into her body; instead, we just let her die peacefully, without any effort, and besides, the woman's family had a "DNR" order ("Do not resuscitate", meaning that we weren't to do any heroic methods to prolong her life; she was dying anyway, and her family wanted the woman to just die on her own, without incident). We knew she was dying, but still, when the tracing of her heart beat flatlined out on the EKG screen and the alarms sounded, we got tears in our eyes because we knew that, at long last, her suffering and pain was at an end, and she was now at peace.
I have seen many a person die in the confines of the hospital environs, but no matter how many times I witness it, I never can get used to it, especially if it involves little babies or young children, or even teenagers who should have many years of living ahead for them; but by some fluke of nature, or by some fateful situation, they end up becoming sick or injured, and they die, even when we try to save them. I can never get used to the idea of an innocent baby or child dying on me, and it doesn't make any sense whatsoever when a kid who is supposed to outlive their folks end up dying, and the parent ends up outliving the kid. It just doesn't compute in my mind's eye, and I can never understand why God would allow an innocent child, a baby, or a teenager to die by some horrible fate, be it an accident, a serious illness, or disease that takes hold of their young bodies and snuffs out their life before they even have a chance to grow up and become something.
I guess we can't save everyone who comes through our hospital doors, but it still ruins a person's day when somebody dies; and today must have been a very bad day because we had two people die during my shift alone. Needless to say, I am now depressed, and I can't wait to get home, so I can put what happened behind me, even if it is only for a little while.
~Written by Genevieve M. Voisin, R.N., on Saturday, July 24, 2004, at 5:42 p.m.
A poignant story about letting go of a narcissist in your life. Have you ever been attacked FULL force by a narcissist? It's the closest thing to being stabbed over and over in the back.
No matter how many times it happens, and no matter how often I have had to help out, I can never get used to the fact that people end up dying despite our best efforts to try to save their life.
