Here I sit, unwinding from another day in the trenches (today's foe: the killer viral gastroenteritis that seems to be wreaking havoc through the Rockies - I think we saw every puking kid in town, twice, today). The unwinding process tonight will be reasonably easy, and sugar-coated by warm fuzzies from the past. It's not always that way, though. I think back to the last time my husband was at an Olympic Games, back in the summer of '04, when I worked one of the most intense shifts of my career. It was like this:
Trauma, my favorite assignment to work. I'd do Trauma every day if they'd let me, and my friends all say I'm nuts. I can't get enough of the adrenaline, though, the buzz that keeps us all on tiptoe as we wait for the ambulance crew, the fluid motion of ten pairs of hands doing something different but all working together, the smells of blood and sweat and fear that permeate the room, the tension, the throwing stuff on the floor and slipping around in pools of blood - *that* is why I work in the ER. But anyway, I digress. I was working trauma, and in the momentary absence of patients I'd been in the back room with a friend, dumping IV fluid into his arm through a 16-gauge to counteract the bender he'd been on the night before. And that's when we got word from Charge, a pediatric arrest, ETA 5 minutes. Shit.
A tiny angel, just 3 weeks old, lifeless and pale, and suddenly she was on my gurney, my responsibility. We all knew it was over, knew it when they wheeled her through the door - but we worked her anyway because it was the right thing to do. SIDS. (Or is it? The jaded cynic in me suspects every parent of the unthinkable when a child dies.) When a pediatric code is ongoing, there's no emotion, you just do your job. Push the meds, wait, compress, bag, push the meds, and so on. It's a little easier to ignore mom and dad at the foot of the bed, I'm doing my job, begging her to not die on my watch. She did anyway. And the moment the code is called, that's when you hear the wailing, the most awful sound you can imagine: the sound of a mother who has just lost a baby. After it was all said and done, I'm in the room with the parents and the baby, I'm changing her diaper one last time and I can't help it, I have to wait for the water from the tap to get warm, even though she doesn't care - and I finish changing her, wrap her in a big puffy blanket and hand her to her dad as the tears roll down my face. I tried to think of something to say, but what do you say?? I mumbled an "i'm sorry," but I doubt they heard it over their own sobbing. And I decided, then and there, that if I ever reach a point where a dead baby doesn't make me cry, I'll become an auto mechanic. It was horrible. I didn't sleep, at all that night, and not well for a good time thereafter.
3 weeks. Can a baby know and feel love in just 3 weeks? I hope so.
Trauma, my favorite assignment to work. I'd do Trauma every day if they'd let me, and my friends all say I'm nuts. I can't get enough of the adrenaline, though, the buzz that keeps us all on tiptoe as we wait for the ambulance crew, the fluid motion of ten pairs of hands doing something different but all working together, the smells of blood and sweat and fear that permeate the room, the tension, the throwing stuff on the floor and slipping around in pools of blood - *that* is why I work in the ER. But anyway, I digress. I was working trauma, and in the momentary absence of patients I'd been in the back room with a friend, dumping IV fluid into his arm through a 16-gauge to counteract the bender he'd been on the night before. And that's when we got word from Charge, a pediatric arrest, ETA 5 minutes. Shit.
A tiny angel, just 3 weeks old, lifeless and pale, and suddenly she was on my gurney, my responsibility. We all knew it was over, knew it when they wheeled her through the door - but we worked her anyway because it was the right thing to do. SIDS. (Or is it? The jaded cynic in me suspects every parent of the unthinkable when a child dies.) When a pediatric code is ongoing, there's no emotion, you just do your job. Push the meds, wait, compress, bag, push the meds, and so on. It's a little easier to ignore mom and dad at the foot of the bed, I'm doing my job, begging her to not die on my watch. She did anyway. And the moment the code is called, that's when you hear the wailing, the most awful sound you can imagine: the sound of a mother who has just lost a baby. After it was all said and done, I'm in the room with the parents and the baby, I'm changing her diaper one last time and I can't help it, I have to wait for the water from the tap to get warm, even though she doesn't care - and I finish changing her, wrap her in a big puffy blanket and hand her to her dad as the tears roll down my face. I tried to think of something to say, but what do you say?? I mumbled an "i'm sorry," but I doubt they heard it over their own sobbing. And I decided, then and there, that if I ever reach a point where a dead baby doesn't make me cry, I'll become an auto mechanic. It was horrible. I didn't sleep, at all that night, and not well for a good time thereafter.
3 weeks. Can a baby know and feel love in just 3 weeks? I hope so.