“Help needed stat in 3117”

I was resource nurse and saw the text. I looked over to 3117 and saw the commotion of people outside the room. They’d already pulled the crash cart over and I knew right away that no other needs – my colleague’s break relief, another neighbor’s request for help with a diaper change and patient repositioning – nothing else took precedence.

“I don’t feel a pulse.”

It was a blur from that point forward. I remember taking over as medication nurse so that the Fellow physician could focus on running the code rather than pushing meds. I remember feeling myself go into that strange, dissociated robot mode so I could focus on the task at hand. I remember the ways my subconscious blended the parents’ cries into background noise, even as emotion after emotion would spring up inside of me. I batted them down like whack-a-mole and focused on organizing my stockpile of meds.

Epinephrine
Calcium
Sodium bicarb
Saline flushes
Alcohol wipes

I kept my eyes trained on my meds.

“No more. No more meds. We have to call it.”

I didn’t have anything left to distract myself with, and so I braced myself for the sound we never, ever get used to.

The guttural cries of the parents dropped all our eyes to the ground. They told the story of love enduring all, love trying to endure this.

In the week that followed, I showed up in other spaces. I stood in a strange liminal space with a different parent of a different child, their lives upheaved by a freak accident that left them with a long and uncertain future ahead. Only time would tell how much the child would or would not return to a fragment of themself. I held the parent’s conflicting hope and sorrow, personal internal growth and delicate frailty. I hugged her tight.

I stood in another space where I told a family member, “I know you don’t want to leave your loved one, but you don’t want to be here for the final step of our postmortem process.”
“Why? What is it?”
“We…shroud your family member.”
“What is a shroud?”
“It’s…a bag.”
“….Oh….ok…I’ll head out shortly.”
“I’m so sorry.”

I told my therapist today, I was holding all this sadness for all these patients and families, of course.

But the thing was…I was there too, in those rooms. The external part of me was calm, professional, competent, sober. But there was this other part of me, deep underneath, that was there too. That was hurting and grieving and absorbing it all too. Pushed deep, deep, deep down…but it was there.

“I was there too,” I told my therapist.

And then I wept, and wept, and wept,

for me,
and for my colleagues,
who were there too.

We need a space, a voice. We are there in the room too.