I'm feeling much less tired and stressed which feels good. I read an excellent book on the way here. "Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss". Loved it.
I have four more books to read and hopefully all of those books are equally as good.
We had supper with my sister and her husband last night whom we haven't seen in two or three years. My sister is shrinking. She must only be five feet tall now. I always forget how odd she is until I see her again. She has a brain injury and never stops talking, ever. She's a good person though.
Five days in paradise.
My first patient died when I was a student. I was twenty-three years old and I had never seen a dying person. I knew how unprepared I was, knew that I had nothing to offer my dying patient, no experience, no empathy even because I was young. What the hell did I know about dying?
I don't remember how that patient died but I know it was on the same unit my father died years later. Since then I have had many, many patients die. Makes me sound like an awful nurse but it's reality. People die. Nurses take care of them as they're dying and after they die.
One of my patients was named Laura. She was an elderly lady who died in the 1980s. Nobody ever came to visit her and when she died there was nobody to pick up her things. I took her African violet home after she died, which somebody must have bought her, and I kept that violet for years. It always reminded me of her.
On that same unit, I had a patient die and then we coded her. She was a woman with breast cancer who had never seen a doctor, never received any treatment and she had not told her family until she had been admitted. She died two days later; the cancer had spread everywhere. I remember there was a lot of blood, they had done a cut down to get a line into her. There was garbage all over the floor. Her family waited in the hallway while the code team worked on her. There was probably fifteen or twenty people in the room and one doctor in charge, loudly calling out instructions. When the code was called and they stopped compressions, the patient still had agonal respirations; I didn't even know what those were, had never seen them. It was horrific and I have hated codes ever since.
I've found patients dead in their beds, dead in the toilet, one patient died while in the elevator on a stretcher. I've watched them take their last breaths, held their hands, comforted their families and been yelled at by their families. I've given morphine to patients, knowing it will be their last dose and turned patients early on an evening shift because I knew they would die when they were turned and the fluids in their body shifted; that particular patient was four hundred pounds and there was no way nights could move his body on their own, so we did it while evening shift was still there to help.
I have washed bodies after patients have died, put beds flat so that the patient won't end up in a strange position when rigor mortis set in ( I learned that one the hard way), wrapped patients in shrouds, attached toe tags and taken patients to the morgue at all hours of the day and night. I've packed up belongings, called families and cried.
I've done all of this for the past thirty-five years and never once has my grief been acknowledged by management or even by myself. I carry all of my dead patients with me, still; working in a cancer hospital has only increased the number of dead I carry with me. I think back to ten years ago when I first started working at the cancer hospital and the majority of those patients are no longer living. There is no memorial, no place for nurses to remember our dead, we carry them in our hearts. Yesterday when my patient's father invited me to her memorial I cried and realized how many dead there are around us, how many we carry with us.
Perhaps nurses need to find a way to honour our dead.
It's not working. We can take care of Jack or we can take care of Katie but we can't do both, not even with two adults. I'm exhausted and have to go back to work tomorrow. The weekends are no longer a time to recharge and Gracie's parents don't want to help out with the little guy which makes me feel resentful. My ex-husband has only visited Katie once in the last fifteen months and he just let me know he won't be coming again for awhile. He used to visit Katie every other weekend which gave us a break but that's gone.
Right now I've got nothing left. Tomorrow will be better. A good sleep will help but changes will have to be made. We can't keep doing this.
We drove down to Westaskiwin today after my mother in law called. Apparently yesterday my father in law had a bad fall. He knocked himself unconscious, ended up in emergency, and needed stitches and bandages. He's on a blood thinner for atrial fib so I imagine there was a lot of blood involved. Then last night he took another funny turn while sitting on the edge of his bed so the paramedics were called again but he declined to go to the hospital.
He looked beat up when we arrived but not as bad as I thought he would be. He was chatty and making jokes. He's eighty-seven and I imagine he is coming close to the end of his life. The last year of life, no matter your age, seems to follow the same path, a downward spiral that becomes more and more impossible to recover from. He's diabetic. He's falling. He's got atrial fib and left branch bundle block. He's on blood thinners which is just a whole other thing that is bad and often necessary for elderly people. He's got prostrate problems and incontinence now.
I like my father in law. He says what he thinks. I don't always agree with him but he's not stupid and he's pretty easy going. He also has a very good sense of humor.
My mother in law was having a hard time today. She's bossy at the best of times and last night she thought her husband of sixty-one years had died, twice, in one day. She wants to control everything (why does that sound so familiar?) but she can't. It's hard watching someone you love, someone you've spent pretty much your entire life with, decline.
