worst nightmare

In my 24 yrs of saving lives, I have never experienced the horror of coming into work and knowing the new “trauma that just came in last nite.” Until today.

Looking over the ICU sheets to see if the unit I was working in had changed at all… same vents? same number of patients… my eye caught a very familiar name to me. A not very common name. A name that I knew very well. Oh dear. My stomach lurched in my throat.

I asked John, the therapist that had the ER/Trauma room last nite about that patient. “What happened?”
“Motorcylce crash, no helmet”
“How old?”
“I think about 58… he has some sort of cardiac history too…”
“oh shit. Vince is 58. He had a heart attack a couple of years ago.”

I felt kind of shakey as I went down to the unit… went to the room where this new trauma was, and sure as shit, it was Vince. On a vent, a bolt in his head (to measure the pressure in his brain)… fahck! I talked to his nurse for a little bit to get his basic status. damn.

Walked back over to our area to wait for report from the nite shift, and called hubby. Didn’t care if I woke him up. He needed to know that one of his best friends since they were in grade school had just crashed his bike and was now unconcious, with a head injury, in the ICU where I was working.

Bottom line, he may or may not need surgery to relieve the pressure in his brain. Head stuff is always a waiting game. Very discouraging to family members because you can’t give them a time frame. You can’t predict when the bleeding may stop, or if it will rebleed. Can’t predict whether the swelling will go down, or how long it will take.

I switched with Jim to work on the other side of the unit. Didn’t think that I could be totally objective…

Here we all are a month ago. Damn.
Not much else to say.