I'm not sure if I can blog about yesterday. I haven't figured it out in my head yet, I haven't defined my coping mechanisms to survive the days when a baby dies not 8 hours after he was born, nor the days when a 20 year old man/boy gets hit by a car and I perform chest compressions in the ER, as I did in clinical a year ago.
Yesterday was controlled chaos with fewer nurses than we should have had. The past week or so, I've been acting less as a orientee and more as one of the nurses who is free to ask questions of the more experienced. The biggest problem is when everyone is busy and going in different directions, and I don't have someone who always has the time to answer questions and guide me.
I know at some time, I'm just going to get dumped into the middle of it and sink or swim. That was yesterday. Three discharges, and one admission. It was a twelve-hour shift and I started charting at 5pm on patients who'd left at 2.
I've never had to care for a mom whose baby is 23 weeks old and shouldn't be born yet. A woman who's had a c-section, whose tears run silent, who doesn't want to say goodbye to her son alone.
So I took care of her. I made sure she got upstairs to the NICU when they called. She spent time with Pastoral Care, and her family arrived. They went up to the NICU and said goodbye.
I mostly listened to her. I listened to her talk about touching her son, then holding him, the weight of a pound of butter. I listened to her talk about her family and what it'll be like telling her three older sons. I listened to her talk about grieving. I listened to her as she thought aloud about how she would mother her family through this experience. How she named her son after her husband. How she gets by on soul.
I tried to visualize her son, and found myself picturing his heart entering everyone he touched in the few hours of his life.
And I came home from work and cried. It's the raw emotion I don't have a direction for. Not good nor bad, just RAW.
