It was a day just like any other day, but that’s the thing about nursing; you just never know. What starts as a slow day can turn into a chaotic one, what appears to be a stable patient can quickly take a turn for the worse, and what patient lands in your once empty hospital bed, you can just never tell. On this particular day it was pretty smooth sailing, up until the call came in that is.
In my particular intensive care unit we receive trauma cases, emergency surgeries, and also acute MI (myocardial infarction, aka, heart attack) patients, to name just a few. I’ve been known to say that it’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. But on this particular day the phone call from the care coordinator did clue us in that it would be a STEMI. For the layman, that means emergency. That means big bad heart attack. That means no life-giving oxygen to the heart muscle. It means heart muscle death. It means nursing be on your toes.
On this particular day the presentation of a tombstone shape on the patient’s EKG was a sad foretelling of what the future held, and she actually had already died twice before even making it to our bed. We had participated in the calls of Code Blue and knew what we were in for if and when she eventually made it to her room, but we waited on pins and needles nonetheless. We stood like sentinels at the ready, gloved hands clasped in anticipation of action.
As imagined once she arrived we never stopped. Like liquid action we flowed around the bed attaching monitors, adding even more life-saving medication drips, and the gears in our heads constantly turning for what more we could do to turn this one around. The blood pressure continued to fall, the heart rate continued to become more erratic, and the options began to run out. This becomes a difficult time for everyone. For the nurse who simply wants to cause no harm and save a life. For the physician who wishes they could have done more. And for the family who must make the decisions no one ever imagined they would have to make.
On this particular day they decided to let mom go, and we all held our heads low wishing we had the adequate words of sympathy and consolation. I had not seen this woman’s face without tubes jutting from it, not until after the life in her had ceased, and that often times makes it hard to see the beauty of the person who ends up in your hospital bed. Sadly in those emergent moments you only treat the monstrous disease process, and it isn’t until afterwards that you take the time to think about exactly who you’re treating. A mom. A sister. A wife. A friend. Just a few weeks prior I had cried at the end of an unsuccessful code when I looked at the woman’s face and pictured her son who had visited just the hour before.
Most of the time in situations like this you actually never know the story of the person who briefly occupied your hospital bed, but in this case I did. She wasn’t just a number, and she was certainly more than some easily forgotten name. The legacy she left behind was the stuff statues are erected about, and as I discovered the kind, caring life of service she had lived for others, without any payment in return, I was humbled to the point of tears. The fact that I had been given the privilege to attend to this unsung hero in her last moments made me proud to live the life of a bedside nurse. I had not saved her, but I had tried, and when they said to let go I had done so with her dignity intact. At least I like to think so. I hope so.
After reading her personal story it brought to mind that we never really have a clue who will end up in our hospital bed. We don’t know if they are amazing servants of mankind who will have their own special crown in Heaven. We don’t know if they have been hurt and beat down so severely by the world that they will also earn their own special crown in the hereafter. We never know the story, but we treat them all the same. Each is given that extra measure of care as if they are already wearing a crown. Or at least I like to think so. I hope so.
Sometimes in nursing it’s easy to get bogged down by the excessive workload, the stress of saving lives, or the annoying bureaucracy of the healthcare machine. It’s easy to put up such a protective wall around your heart that you forget the heart is the center of our care. It’s easy to just see a “patient” and not see their story. It’s easy to forget what a privilege it is to serve and sometimes save someone’s mother, father, husband, or child. We should try to always remember that everyone leaves a legacy of some sort behind, that everyone is special in their own right. And because we care for them in those intimate moments we have a very special job indeed.