Struggle

I’ve gotten a glimpse of dealing with life and death. I haven’t had a patient die yet, but a lot of my patients are facing death in the next few years, and some are facing a more imminent death within a year. Illness makes people act in ways they never imagined. Long hospital stays produce a struggle between patients and nurses. Patients become very particular about how they want something done. They are grasping for any opportunity to have control over something, anything in their lives, because so much at that point is beyond their control. They’re scared. Nurses are used to doing things a certain way, and they like it that way. Plus, they don’t have time to be bending over backwards to do things differently because a patient has emotional problems. It's a struggle because you became a nurse because you care and you like caring for people. It's a struggle because you don't have enough time to just be with patients for very long. You always need to be getting meds or changing dressings or taking vital signs or something.

Then you have your really needy patients. Literally every 2 minutes they want the nurse back in the room to do something for them. They’re lonely. They’re scared. But we as nurses don’t have time to just sit there or time to grab a Kleenex for them on one trip and then 1 second later grab some ice and then 5 seconds after that move the table to the other side of the bed. It really can get a little ridiculous.

One woman really weighs heavily on my heart. She doesn’t ever use a call light. She just calls out, “Nurse, nurse,” louder and louder until someone comes. It’s a bad situation because nobody is exactly running to her bedside, because we know that it’s not serious, but what if one day it is serious… well, if it is serious she won’t be able to call out, I guess. So anyhow, you get to her room, and she’s laying there, unable to do anything for herself. She’s hooked up to oxygen that’s going in through her trach and she’s got nutrients being pumped into her stomach because her swallow and gag reflexes are gone, and she’s got lots of meds being pumped into her veins, and you can see the fear in her eyes. And she says, “Will you stay with me?” She wasn’t my patient, but I stayed for a few minutes. As long as I could and talked to her.

I don’t want to live that long. Don’t hook me up to a feeding tube! Let nature take its course. I would rather be dead than confined to a bed with a million tubes coming out of me, lonely and scared.