Yesterday was my amazing husband’s birthday, and I wanted to make it a happy one for him even though I had to work 12 hours and we aren’t “celebrating” until tonight. I woke up in a great mood, decorated a bit, left his personal gift from me out for him to find when he woke up, and headed to work. He loved the gift and had a great day at work. I was trying to keep in touch with him and be extremely positive, but around noon some things started happening that made it hard for me to do that.
I could draw these stories out and make you cry, because I certainly did, but I don’t want to be gratuitous. So I’ll just tell you in brief. First, I spent almost three hours literally standing at the bedside of a patient with her family, giving medications to keep her comfortable as we watched her die, explaining the process to them as it happened in front of our eyes. Afterwards it was my job to spend some one-on-one time with the body removing the invasive equipment and preparing it to be picked up.
Not thirty minutes after that was taken care of, before I really had any time to mentally process it, the code blue alarm went off. This doesn’t happen often on our unit because patients are usually made DNR by the time their disease gets extremely serious. But for the past year we have been taking care of a 24-year-old girl who was pregnant when she found out she had an inoperable tumor wrapped around her heart. Our unit kind of adopted her, and when her baby was born via C-section at 23 weeks we gave her a baby shower. She’s from New Mexico so she didn’t have any supplies here in Houston at the apartment she’d been renting. I’ve had her picture on my refrigerator for months so I’d remember to pray for her and her family.
Yesterday when the code alarm went off it was because her heart stopped pumping and she stopped responding. Unfortunately, her mother wasn’t in the room at the time so we were forced to do all we could to bring her back. If you have never witnessed a scene such as this in real life, you are blessed. There is no thought of modesty as the clothes are ripped off in order to do CPR and defibrillation. The room is swarming with people while the patient is intubated, chest pounded, and stuck with needles. I was one of the first ones there so I ended up being the one pushing medications, applying the heart paddles, and when her IV needle pulled out I had to insert a new one as fast as possible.
We finally got in touch with her mother after almost thirty minutes of CPR with no response at all from the patient, and her mother told us not to continue. She was gone. We quickly cleaned her, removed the tubes and wires, and closed her eyes. Then we went outside and took turns hugging her mother and crying with her. I couldn’t cry long though, because my other patients needed me, and they needed me to be happy as usual, as if nothing had happened.
An hour later I was on my way home to watch UT lose. I wish they would have won, mostly because it meant a lot to my husband, but after the day I had it didn’t seem as important as it had that morning.
I didn’t intend to write this much, but I guess I just needed to get it out. Nurses grieve for their patients, and this is part of me moving on. I hope I can put it away for the rest of the day and give my husband the birthday celebration that he deserves.
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