This month marks my 6 month anniversary working in the Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF. I am happy to report that I love my job more with each passing shift and am continually inspired by the amazing nurses, families, and patients I work with daily. But as with any job dealing with life and death, there are the good days and the really bad ones.
The bad ones often start off unsuspecting, like any other shift there is friendly banter as the new staff arrives, change of shift report, and the regular bustle of the unit. One minute it is business as usual, until on the turn of a dime, a baby will code, or mom will die, we'll lose someone. I should expect it more I guess. I am in the business of medicine, which is definetly not always a success story, specifically in the Intensive Care Unit.
I have grown this year in my acceptance of death. This fall I had my nursing clinical on a palliative care unit at Laguna Honda. Every day I fed and bathed people who could no longer speak, wondering if this would be their last day, giving extra care to tuck them in nice with extra human touch. I had a patient die and sat with the family, listened to stories, and tried to share the burden of grief. I was honored to be a part of these patients' lives even for a short time. I learned about death in class, how to identify it, how to help the patient and family mourn and accept. And through this learning, I confronted my own ideas about death, and began to understand it more.
Coming to work in the ICN, the first thing I thought was how fun it would be to work with cute, cuddly babies. But the reality I was confronted with is that a lot of these kids are extremely sick. Many of them get better and leave us and go on to live wonderful and normal lives. Some heal a little and learn to live with their chronic illness, or move upstairs into the Pediatric ICU. But the worst is when some leave us because of death. It happens. It is horrible each and every time to witness a life lost and the resulting devastation to parents, family, and us, the staff. Plainly put: the death of a child is a horrible event.
When I first started working here it caught me offgaurd even thinking about babies dying, and how that was a sad but normal part of life here. On the dark days when we lose a child or a mother I witness how deeply it effects the staff. On those shifts, those who know what happened walk with heads hung, bearing the devastating grief of the family. Several staff pass me with red, puffy eyes and running noses, heading to assist the patients they still can. The rest of the staff is unknowing, giving out friendly waves at 3am as they shuffle past me. It always astounds me that life goes on. That for a few people the world has stopped turning, stuck on the moment they learned the truth. But for everyone else it is another night shift, another hour closer to going home, a cruel reality that I am still learning.
In summary I am saying that dealing life and death is hard. It is so hard and something I struggle with every day here. And tonight is an especially hard one. But I will go and cuddle another sweet baby because that is what we must do as caregivers, find hope in the patients we can help. As always, I leave this shift so grateful for everything I am learning here, good days and bad days, I wouldn't trade it for the world.
