Saturday, June 26, 2004

saying goodbye

There were a few switcheroos today saving lives, and I wound up in my fav ICU. As I mentioned last nite, it's reeeally busy right now - everywhere. But what topped it off was that a patient who was a frequent flyer for many years and quite a likable character, was scheduled to die... and I was going to expedite the process by removing him from life support.

As I've also mentioned before, is that it's one thing to take care of lifeless, dying patients in a sterile, generic environment, but when the patient is surrounded by crying loved ones, it's an entirely different scenerio.

Fortunately, removing the breathing tube from Tony took place when 2nd shift was on, but I was sitting and charting directly in front of his room where his mom and brother were standing and waiting to go back in. As is sometimes the case, as soon as we remove the tube and ventilator from the patient, they immediately start to gasp, and the nurse and doc have to adjust the morphine to make the patient more comfortable to prevent that from happening.

Since it seemed to be taking forever before the family was summoned back in his room to be with him, I got up and walked over to them. I bent down and took mom's hand (she was in a wheelchair) and told her how sorry I was, and that it was a pleasure knowing and working with Tony all of these years. Of course it was a very tearful exchange, and no sooner had I walked away, I was called to another patient's room to make some vent changes. I grabbed a Kleenex while the doc was waiting for me, and onward I went... and that was that.

::sigh::

Sooo, that was the general flavor of my entire day... and I am very glad to be home this weekend.