Basking in my misery

o   A skin assessment on a woman who looked like someone had painted her with a yellow highlighter.  

o   A man with CBI—continuous bladder infusion—because of an abdominal mass who was also pending pacemaker placement. Then the doctor rather callously pointed out to the gaggle of nursing students the petechia vs ecchymosis vs purpura that dotted this patient’s body and then told him about his new diagnosis of leukemia, and that chemo would likely kill him. After his room was silent, I went back to hold his hand and cry with him. He told me that his mother’s name was Caroline and about his 5 sons. I told him that good things were to come, which I believed would eventually happen, but I also recommended to the director that he be transferred to IMC, which he was.  

o   A Cuban woman with a distended belly. I told her family, “Me casé con un Cubano.” They laughed and asked how that was going for me. Later that night, right after her family left, her nurse walked in and found her in asystole. 

o   The schizophrenic man who had lived on our unit for more than a month: the man in limbo with an disabled mother and an unwilling society, a man who lived within his nightmare that his mother was being tortured; he finally lashed out and attacked a nurse last week. He is now existing in a jail. 

o   I sat in the room all day, watching a woman sleep, not as a nurse, but as a sitter to make sure she didn't hurt herself again. When the doctor told her that the case manager would find her a psychiatric hospital to stay in, she asked if she could borrow underwear since her sister had found her naked, unresponsive in the tub after a calculated overdose. Her sister called me and told me how grateful she was that the kids were at school when she found her.

Sometimes I find myself basking in misery. It’s not the strain of the bad outcomes that run me down, but the anger of the patients who are living in the unknown, being somewhere they don’t want to be, the frustration of not knowing why their body is misbehaving and when it will stop, letting their anger spill onto me. 

I went for another therapeutic hike this week and talked with God. I felt rejuvenated again, but the next morning hit me with sorrow on my way to work. At work, while a fellow nurse was at lunch, I went into his patient's room to remove an IV. It was a patient I wasn't expecting to see, one I had a few months before with whom I had formed a bond. He told me about a friend from Chile. I told him about serving a mission in Chile. He said that although he was no longer interested, he had been baptized as a teenager and played basketball in carpeted church gyms.

God was watching out for me that day. 

Today in General Conference, President Nelson spoke powerfully about momentum. Living waters always flow. Today I am convinced the course of these waters are controlled by God. Continuously re-learning this is the challenge.