Juxtapose

Sar and I were talking yesterday over some Ramen in my kitchen. I know everyone thinks all I talk about is being a nurse but it's just one of those things that occupies a lot of my thoughts these days. I'm, unfortunately, not at the point in my learning and development in this thing where I can leave it behind me at work and walk out with a fresh new breath. I love the show Scrubs where Dr Kelso just steps out the doors to the hospital, takes a deep breath, and his crabby face melts into this grin as he leaves it alllll behind. I hope someday I can have something like that where it doesn't completely consume my thoughts outside of work.

Sar and I were talking about dying. She sees it far more than I do, being that she's in the ICU. It's funny how a place where you have to be so much more technically competent is also the place where you take whole classes on bereavement and how to talk to families with compassion. It's not that that isn't important on the floor where I work, it's just more that I get people that are still very sore from cracked open sternums and surgical wounds, but are running (a little bit) off the high of feeling that their problem is "fixed." A funny thing, really, to see the nervous faces people have pre-op and the "no worries" smiles they have post-op. The transition is huge, they feel their problem is fixed, even if it may not be, and even though they still have a few days of very squirrely health ahead of them and weeks and weeks of intense recovery afterwards.

I think it's funny how many things can go wrong with people, and how each problem comes from a different perspective. We have three big cardiac areas at our hospital - the cardiovascular operating suites, the cardiac medical unit, and the cardiac surgical unit. I'm in the latter of these three, and I mostly get post-ops. The CMU gets all the chest pain patients, the people terrified that they're having a heart attack (and they usually are). So I don't see that side of things often. I get the people with multi-system failures, the people for whom they're surgically intervening with hopes of bringing up some... quality of life... maybe. They're stable enough. They're sick, but often it's chronically or at least they are stable enough that the ICU just wants them off their floor so we in the middle-ground progressive care business can bring them back up out of the gutter. Sar, however, gets the people who are sick-sick. And death is a possibility for these people. We talked about that fear of death, just hearing words and seeing in peoples' eyes the total unknown. There is such an unknown without Christ. We were talking about how to comfort people in that case, when all we want to say is, God Is Near and Here Is Why. But there is sometimes no way to say that, per se. Such a scary thing, this world is.

I was happy we talked about that yesterday, because today I got one of those chest pain patients, the ones who have never had it before, the ones who were transferred to us from the small-town hospital because there was nothing else they could do for them, and the ones who had a massive heart attack for the first time in their life. And she was inconsolable, really. Afraid. Not the same terror, perhaps, that Sar saw in the eyes of the patient whose story inspired the conversation between us. But just complete, utter uncertainty. Like, "What can you do to fix this and how could you possibly do anything when I can't even make my own body do what it needs to do?" Just scared.

I forget, sometimes, about what a surety it is to know God, what an edge that takes off of the terror of just living this life. People can carpe diem all they want, they can drink every delicious wine and take in every scene of beauty, but all of us die. And, for most of us, there will come a day when no matter how beautiful we are, no matter how accomplished, we will feel our bodies are no longer truly our own. We will will our limbs to move and they will be too weak, we will pray our hearts to beat in a steady rhythm and they won't, and we will look at our faces in the mirror and realize how little control we have over anything. I don't really know how to end this thought.