Juxtapose

Better days.

Okay, so I seriously don't see many people die. Well, I do. But where I come from, people "code," go flatline, arrest, whatever, and then the troops rush in and everything is all adrenaline and movement and you either work it until the docs say it's too late (but sometimes it can be a two-hour ordeal, depending on the patient and the doctor), or the patient is like, Oh, hey, scratch that, I'm still here. I still don't understand, from a Christian standpoint, how that works - that limbo of soul - is it here or there or what? I'll ask that one in the heavenlies, I guess.

So today I saw my first, bonafide person expire in that way that looks most natural but seems most unnatural to me, cardiac-surgical nurse, revasculizer extraordinaire, worker of a floor where people generally get better or get shipped to hospice to give up the ghost. The few times I have seen them expire on the telemetry monitors there has been family present, and I didn't go and gape at the scene like I wanted to. This time I had had this guy as my patient three days ago, he was talking and up and around and cute as a button, but pretty much ready to stop having trouble breathing and carrying around an o2 tank everywhere with him, one of those "do not resuscitate, do not intubate" types. I really don't blame him, but I kinda thought he'd go home and die there sometime way later in the future. I kinda wish he had gone home. All the same, his family left a few hours before he started having extreme difficulty breathing and he started circling the drain so quickly that even though they called right away, the family was still en route while he was passing away. When I went in to check if the nurse caring for him was doing okay, I saw our critical care educator sitting there, as well as a bunch of other newer nurses standing around, holding this guy's hands, and eventually his breathing got slower and slower and his heart rate did too, and eventually they just took of the o2 mask that was the little thread holding him there, and it was over within a minute.

I guess I'm a little hormonal, all things considered, but my eyes welled up because all I could think of was that this happens all the time, all over the place, and people don't even know who God is. Like, what He is about. That He is so full of grace for our most vulnerable times like that of death. I like to hope that he took this guy by the arm and introduced him to heaven. But I just don't know, and this is the part of nursing that I hate, because sometimes I'd rather forget the part about how fragile these bodies are. One dumb thing happens and you could be gonzo in a second, and what have you probably accomplished? Probably not much, if you're anything like me. You've probably done a lot of great and fun and exciting things but nothing worth much to speak of, really, when it comes down to the serious stuff. Really makes me think.

So that's that. I had my cry on the way home and Mark suggested the great plan of going out to eat at our most favorite Mexican restaurant ever, La Carretta, where we were served by a (presumably Mexican, but at least Spanish-speaking) guy who looked almost exactly like a south-of-the-border version of my favorite Asian man, John Pham. When we looked at the check at the end of the meal to see the name of our server, we laughed - "Johnathan." How's that for irony? We left a big tip in honor of his good service, as well as his welcome resemblance to Pham, and now we are home, bunkered in for the weekend, or at least until I work again on Sunday, warm and exhausted in my home.