Why Do I Do What I Do??

It's been a hard week at work...

Lately, my patient load has been filled with run-of-the-mill ICU patients...patients with respiratory or cardiac issues, drug overdose patients, an occasional psych violent patient (those are ALWAYS fun), as well as post open heart patients.

Monday and Tuesday were much different.

I received report on my patients on Monday, and quickly discovered that there was a problem. One of my patients was a burn patient....so WHAT IN THE HECK was she doing at Gadsden Regional??? I worked for a year on the Burn unit at UAB, and while it was a difficult place to work, my hat is off to that place. They really know what they are doing with burn victims. I have seen some amazing stories of healing there. I knew that this patient had no business being anywhere but there. For various reasons, the previous 2 nurses that had this patient while she was at the Gadsden ICU had been unable to make any progress with initiating a transfer to Bham. But, Monday morning when I was working, the physician on-call was ready to listen to me and agreed for an immediate transfer. I was relieved, and didn't even mind doing the official 'ride-along' that is required for ICU patients. The ambulance ride wasn't too rough, and it was almost nice to see my old workplace (ALMOST nice, I said...:) )

On the ride back from Bham, I felt so good. I felt like God had Himself had made out the staffing assignment that morning so that I would be able to take care of this 18 year-old girl. None of the other nurses have burn unit experience, and the charge nurse who assigned me to her care didn't even know I had the experience. I felt like I was at work on this day just to make sure this girl got what she needed. I was so grateful, and it reminded me of all the reasons I became a nurse.

Now comes Tuesday...

What started out as a regular day quickly changed when we were told that there was a 13 year-old boy 'coding' in the ER. He had a congenital heart defect, already had a pacemaker. He obviously wasn't stable enough to yet transfer to Children's Hospital, so everyone kept fighting on for him..and the code was going on into the 2nd hour down in the ER. Just as they were about to quit, he got a pulse back...so they sent him upstairs to us in the ICU...and he coded again. He wasn't my patient, and I really didn't want anything to do with it, but I soon realized that this was going to be a team effort, so I joined in the fight. We were all exhausted, sweating, out of breath, but working together as a team. Almost an hour went by, and right before the doctor was going to call it quits, we got a pulse back.

The lifeflight helicopter to Bham was in route to get him, so the nurse who had him, as well as myself and another nurse stayed at the patient's bedside trying to maintain everything until the flight nurse arrived. In the midst of this, we watched the family (momma, daddy, brother, extended family) come in to see their baby boy. The flight nurses got him loaded up, the family came back in one more time to say goodbye, and we all went downstairs to get him on the helicopter. Security was having to control the crowd of family that was outside praying outloud and trying to see everything going on at the helicopter landing pad. He was loaded into the chopper, and we went inside.

While I was SO proud to be a part of such a fabulous group of nurses who worked so hard as a team without stopping, I had to work really hard to get past the fact that we had just spent hours working on somebody's baby boy. This 13 year old should have been outside playing, swimming, doing anything but clinging to life in a rescue helicopter. Did what we did make a difference? Or had he already been down too long and we were refusing to quit? I don't know. Morale was pretty low the remainder of the day...we worked so hard to ignore emotions while we worked so we could get the job done. But once we were finished and had to 'go back to work' caring for patients, there wasn't much left to give. We were dragging and counting down the hours until we could go home and hug our own healthy children.

Monday at work, I know I made a difference. Tuesday -- did we really do anything that helped? That is the frustration and the dismay with being in the medical profession. Sometimes you can do everything right, work as physically hard as you can, have all the help you can get...and it doesn't seem to matter.

I was looking for some Scripture on encouragement from the day. The concordance pointed me toward Isaiah 41, and my eye wandered to this..."Fear not, for I am with thee. Be not dismayed, for I am thy God..." It helps to remember WHO is still in control (cause we definitely aren't!) and WHY we are not to be dismayed in this world that doesn't make sense so much of the time! Sometimes that is the only reason to help get through things and to understand why I do what I do!!