Down by the seaside siftin sand

Working in the hospital, you meet some great people with fabulous stories. Along with those amazing stories; however, there’s almost always dark stories. A side to people that they would sooner forget about but it continues to haunt them. I think people in their 20s 30s and 40s are much more able to put the blackness on the backburner and let life kind of occupy their minds and fill their daily existence. What most of us younger people generally don’t know is that as the years creep up on you, and all the people you have ever loved disappear one by one, all those choices and mistakes you made throughout your life resurface. The worst part of replaying those mistakes over and over in your mind is that you can never change them. Maybe you didn’t realize at that time you were doing something wrong. Maybe you did realize immediately and you paid for it every day for the rest of your life knowing full well the horror you committed. It’s unreal the things patients will confess to you when they are at their most vulnerable; when the only light in the room is what filters in through from the streetlights and their heads rest trustingly on a pillow and their tired eyes look past you to the time they remember.. be it fondly or with dread. But confess they do.

And among the tales of incredible sadness and desperation, there are always glimmers of joy. Happiness in the here and now.

A perfect example of what I am talking about was a lovely woman named Marianne. I was a nurse’s aide at the time when I met her. She was a beautiful, youthful 78. Vibrant, full of light. Even in a hospital gown, she oozed class and beauty.. her hair was perfect, and had on a full face of makeup. She told me all about her years teaching dance in New York City, and fondly recounted her exciting, glamorous life to me over the course of several days. One busy afternoon, I was ambulating Marianne (she was a post op open heart patient, walking 4x a day after surgery is standard practice for best outcomes). As we were walking past the physician’s area, I saw her eyeing all the young Drs. Marianne asked me if I knew how to waltz. I answered “not really”. She responded “You will know now!” Her hands went up, while holding mine. “Left foot here, right foot there, now back, side..” we waltzed across the hospital floor (and her nurse at the time, Greg, looked white as a sheet LOL). This woman 2 days post surgery was laughing and spinning with me around the floor. The dance ended with her giving me a spin, then we stopped and curtsied and every Dr. and resident in the physician's area STOOD UP and clapped for us. Marianne turned to me and quietly said, “Now THAT, my darling is what sets women like us apart from the rest." And with that, she winked at me. :) She and I walked back to her room and she started telling me about a gentleman she once loved many, many years ago. She said he wrote a song about her that was on the top 40 and she started to sing the lyrics in the sweetest little voice. I vaguely recall it having her name in it and something about the sea, little children loving her. Since I was thinking about her while writing this, I googled what I could remember and.. well I’ll be damned, I found it! Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuvB2XrP_M

She also told me some of her darker secrets, but I can’t share them on here since I’ve sort of identified her with that song, and I would never want to betray her confidence. I will say that she alluded to something she did in her 20s that she said she regrets every day of her life and she’s sure she will burn in hell for it and she looks forward to the day she can finally pay for what she did when she finally dies. She didn’t tell me exactly what happened but I was able to read between the lines and figure it out. She was probably one of the most complex and fascinating people I have ever met and my heart breaks for her that deep down inside, she identifies who she is as a person by one moment where she did something unspeakable. I also understand now why God is so forgiving when I think about her. If only she could forgive herself.

Another woman who stands out in my mind that I met was yet another well put together 88 year old. (you would NEVER guess her age based on the spring in her step and the wit of her words or her perfectly up to date style). She wanted to get discharged ASAP, there was a big sale at Macys and her boyfriend was on his way. LOL! I was doing her paperwork and her boyfriend showed up and kept on pestering me to get the paperwork done. So I finally get in there and she tells me she likes my lipstick. So I write down the name and brand on her med list. Her boyfriend (who looked like he was in his 60s *wolf whistle*! ;) ) Is getting more and more impatient. Then we started talked about Pandora bracelets and charms and I told her I got a charm for each of my kids on my bracelet and for my 10^th anniversary. Then she was like wow! How old were you when you got married? You’re 36, now?! Nooo” and then I told her I couldn’t believe how old she was when I saw her birth date and she put up her hand and said “Stop! He has no idea how old I am!” I said, “Don’t worry sweetheart, I wouldn’t dream of giving that away, you spry little fox, you..” and finally the boyfriend blurts out “OH MY GOD CAN YOU TWO PLEASE KNOCK IT OFF SO WE CAN JUST GO?!” LOL!!!! And not long after that we were all done with the paperwork and my little 88 year old lady gave me a big hug in her cute Capri pants and holding her mylar balloons and flowers then practically skipped away to the elevator with a guy 20 years hear junior on her arm.

Thanks to those women, and women (and even men) like them, I truly understand that age really is just a number. I might give them medical treatments and advice but the beauty is what they give back to me will carry me through a lifetime and reverberate through to every other patient I come into contact with. Being a nurse rules sometimes. :)

The 65 year spread

What an interesting bunch of patients over the weekend. A 20 yr old male with Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome (and cardiac conduction disorder), an 85 year old male with uncontrolled hypertension and ridiculously low heart rates at night (omg, cute as a frickin button! scheduled for a pacer placement), another 85 year old male scheduled for open heart surgery (CABG (coronary artery bypass graft) one of the 'youngest' 85s I have ever seen, a very pleasant 52 year old male with a tracheostomy who miraculously survived v-fib turned cardiac arrest (also had PEG tube in for bolus feeds and crushed meds), a sweet little blind 72 year old woman also with uncontrolled hypertension (had her on a nicardipine drip until her BPs dropped to the 90/50s from 200/100s.. drip was d/c ed once it dropped and ber BPs steadily rose THANK GOD), and a delightful Jamaican woman in with vertigo who I admitted yesterday was able to discharge today; she actually got up and gave ME a hug, not the other way around. (I'm usually the one to initiate hugs. :) )

The 20 year old was doing schoolwork on his laptop and he had an open book next to him.. in one glance I knew it was an engineering book (being married to an engineer made me very familiar with those types of oddly formatted, diagram-filled formula laden mumbo jumbo pages). I ask him what type of engineering he's studying and he says "civil engineering". He goes to a local university NOTORIOUS for drunk kids getting dragged into the emergency dept.. so I said, "Wow, it's really nice having a _____ student here without a dangerously high blood alcohol level!" He started to laugh but I could tell I he was really nervous; so I went back to the engineering talk and mentioned my husband is an electrical engineer.. now that kind of grabbed the kid's interest. We talked a bit about where my husband worked and for how long, how I met him, how long we dated... the discussion got very specific to my situation and I don't generally like telling too much about myself but sometimes that's the only way to establish rapport with someone, so I figured it was okay. Got home that night and told my spouse the story and my husband was like, "You do realize that thanks to you, that kid is pretty sure he's going to land a Victoria's Secret model once he graduates with his big fancy engineering degree, don't you?"

well, DUH


I was thinking a lot about where I want my career to go and I am still 99% sure I am destined to become a hospice nurse. The weekend program hospital money is nice but I don't think I can keep doing cardiac post op med surg for years and years. I really love the cardiac population but I never feel like I have enough time to really get to know them and support them. I do my best and a lot of pts. are very grateful for what I do give to them, but I want my job to be more patient/patient family focused. I just know I would be great at it. I think there is SO MUCH to be learned from the dying, and I think death can be a beautiful, serene experience. It's a part of life and our society keeps so quiet about it as if it doesn't exist. Honestly, the hardest part of my job is when someone dies unexpectedly.. there's no closure for the dying or their families and the patient is surrounded by total strangers usually. When the Dr's leave the room it looks like a friggin hurricane went through. Syringes everywhere, papers all over, plastic wrappers from this or that. No family ever should have to see their expired loved one surrounded by a mess like that.. so I immediately clean up the room then perform post mortem care. When the family arrives, I tell them about what the last moments were like for the patient, I relay any last words they may have spoken, then I offer to sit with the family if they wish.(they usually refuse if there's more than 1 person.) Then I pull the curtain and let them say their goodbyes.
Death is sad and final and causes such loneliness and despair for the people who are left behind, but it's also poetic and beautiful. It's the closing of an exquisite leather book cover. The reading of the story is over, but bits and pieces of it stay with those who took the time to read it. ...and bits and pieces of our loved ones stay with us because we took the time to love them.