Just a glimpse...

I truly do love my job. To be a critical care nurse you really do have to be a little warped. We laugh at completely inappropriate and NOT funny things, make light of disgusting things, and can eat every bite of our lunch while discussing the most vile purulent drainage from a patient's wound or the consistency, frequency, and horrific smell of the stool from a GI bleeder. In some sick way, we almost look forward to codes, because we are all hooked on the adrenalyn rush. We fight over patient assignments...not for the easiest patients, but for the sickest, because they are the most interesting. Death and dying are part of our daily work. We run our asses off for hours at a time and work so hard to keep someone alive thru the night only to come back the next night to find out they coded an hour after we left. I have spent the last week at work taking care of a 46 year old man that came to our unit last Thursday afternoon (which, by the way, was his 46th birthday) and promptly after I came on shift decided to take a nosedive into the sepsis cesspool. Amazingly and against all odds he was still alive when I came back to work Sunday night, but tonite he died. He was polite enough to wait until all his family got here, including a son who was in North Korea in the armed forces. In the few days that I took care of him I got to know his wife, who is director of nursing in a long term care facility, and his son's girlfriend, who will graduate nursing school in May. I saw his big strapping sons cry like babies alongside their 14 year old sister. I held his wife's hand as he died, and helped her cut off a piece of his hair to take home with her. It was emotionally draining and heartbreaking to see their last tiny bit of hope fade away into the knowledge that despite every last possible effort, he was not going to make it. And at the end, when they had said their last goodbyes, the wife and son's girlfriend hugged me and thanked me and told me that I would never know just how much I had touched all of their lives. And this, my friends, is why I do what I do.