I was young, hormones were coursing through my veins. Of course I had some romantic interest in some nurses, residents and medical students here and there, who wouldn't? I confess, the financial prospect of ending up with a doctor had not escaped the outer reaches of my imagination. “Hey Doc, how'd you like to be a patron of the arts?” was the joke I told my coworkers whenever I saw an attractive girl in scrubs and a lab coat. I went on a date with a med student, but unlike her med school curriculum, there was not a lot of chemistry.
I knew at my most charming, the chasm between their professional world and the jerk pushing a wheel chair was a big one. Looking back, I thank my lucky stars I never actually got involved with a doctor.
I had a secret admirer who turned out to be the daughter of a patient—and not particularly attractive. Her interest in me ended abruptly when she discovered that I wasn't a doctor.
At least I looked like a doctor apparently.
Maybe it was time to stop being that guy pushing the wheelchair. As a music major college drop-out with no intention of giving up music and seven years of hospital work under my belt, to stay with it—love or hate—was the best option until something solid churned up in music.
I kept my eye out for full-time hospital jobs in Rochester; anything that didn't involve a mop or require certification. With ambitions of attending The Berklee School of Music, I took a trip to Boston and submitted my resume at nearly all of the twenty-hundred-bazillion hospitals in Beantown to no evail. I even briefly considered gong to nursing school but determined I didn't want to invest in something I had no passion for.
One day I got a call from a woman named Anita O'Halla. She wanted me to come in and interview for a position as an ICU technician at Highland Hospital.
A technician? In an intensive care unit? Whoa! It was exactly the type of opportunity I had hoped for... But, whoa!
During the interview she told me plainly that all the other people she was considering had a lot more experience with patient care. No surprise there; EMTs, ER technicians and nursing assistants were among my fellow applicants. Even though I had been working in hospitals for the last seven years I had never made a bed with hospital corners or taken a blood pressure. This was an experimental type of position at Highland and there would be a lot of on-the-job training.
It seemed a long shot and a lot to hope for. Highland was a nice small hospital and only six blocks from where I lived. Not only would it be a full time job with respectably more money, but there would be benefits, actual health insurance!
To my great surprise Anita called a few days later and offered me the job!
The irony is that if I thought I really had a good chance at the job I might have been more nervous and blown the interview. Anita described the job in detail and said how intense (no pun intended) it could be at times. She asked me pointedly if I thought I could handle it.
“Yeah, no problem.”
I was so under-qualified for this job, it seemed pointless to stress about it? Don't get me wrong, I was pretty sure I could do the job if given the opportunity. I have a talent for throwing myself into new things quickly and I probably said something to that effect. I looked confident and Anita figured I was worth taking a chance on.
There is a short list of people who have taken a chance on me like Anita O'Halla did. Even though health care was not a passion of mine, I worked with some amazing people and gained human experience that made me a better person.
Thank you Anita, wherever you are!
I learned a lot about human physiology and the practical side of critical patient care. I learned how to perform EKGs, and six different ways to measure and test urine. I learned how to read and measure normal and abnormal heart rhythms. Then there was the scary stuff like performing, CPR, drawing blood from veins and arterial lines, inflating balloons on the ends of Swan Ganz catheters in the pulmonary artery and taking readings from a cardiac output computer, assisting with sterile procedures and—the one that makes everyone cringe when I tell them about it—inserting urinary catheters.
Then there was the gross stuff... I won't trouble you!
On the job most of what I did was routine: getting and charting vital signs, washing patients who couldn't do it on their own and making beds, often with the patients still in them.
“Codes” or “code blue” means, well heck, everyone's seen “ER”. When a code was called, my chief responsibility was to 'get stuff' and get it fast. I also ran (literally) samples to the lab and assisted in whatever way I could.
One of the residents or med students would usually perform chest compressions at the beginning of a code, which, when done correctly, are pretty tiring. When those folks got winded one by one, a succession of a nurses would take over and then, eventually, me.
I can remember once doing chest compressions on a patient right after my shift started. I timed my rhythm to a song I had heard on the radio that morning. Unfortunately, the codes that went on long enough for me to be called into service at the center of things were usually, by that time, a lost cause. The patient pronounced dead while I was kneeling next to them on the bed and pumping their chest.
I sometimes felt more like I was an harbinger of death than a saver of lives. I remember giving one of them a shave a couple days after the fact. I was part of the team and contributed to saving a lot of lives. I just hoped that one day the CPR I performed would actually do someone some good. Eventually there were two people saved after I did CPR.
TMI Alert Skip ahead if you're easily grossed-out.
The chest compressions shown on TV in the movies are not often like the real thing. When done correctly, the sternum is pressed down hard enough that it 'squishes' the heart so it pumps blood. It's pretty brutal really. When a patient has been receiving chest compressions for that long, some ribs are often already broken. When the duty came around to me, I could feel the bones already grinding beneath my hands.
Even though most codes were successful in resuscitating the patient, I only did chest compressions on codes that went on for a long time, so very few of the those people survived. They usually “called it” a few minutes after I had jumped up on the bed.
I also had the opportunity to perform a defibrillation... well actually a cardioversion. That's the thing with the paddles... you know...
-eeeeeeeeee- “CLEAR!” -eeeee-
SSCHOCKKK!
It's like defibrillation except it's not an emergency. Officially, a doctor is supposed to perform this and there was one standing right behind me sure enough. He asked me if I wanted to do it and I did.
Cardioversion patients are placed in a non anesthetic sleep-state using a drug called Versed. Often the patient, upon being shocked, would sit bolt upright and say out loud “OWWW!!!” then fall back asleep as if nothing had happened. They would have no memory of the event. Another feature of 'vitamin-V' as I called it: zero recall.
After I had been on the job a couple months as was leaving to go home one day I ran into the daughter of a man that had been in the ICU a couple of days before. ICU stays are usually pretty short before the patient is transferred to a regular floor. I wheeled his man up to his new room myself. I had developer a rapport with both he and his family so when I saw the woman my face lit up and I asked her. “How's Charlie doing?”
“Dad passed away earlier today,” she said.
It was as if I had been hit with a two-by-four. I had lost my first patient. It wouldn't be the last. It was an ICU, I saw dozens of people pass. Violently in the throngs of a do-whatever-you-can, all-hands-on-deck heroic measures code, or slowly and peacefully with “do not resuscitate orders” signed and a family gathered around. Peaceful deaths are nothing like on TV and the movies by-the-way. The heart lumps out an occasional labored beat every few seconds. This could go on for an hour or more.
I soon developed a protective shell regarding death. No other patient death effected me personally the way that first one did.
Except for one.
It was the late eighties/early nineties and people in the end stages of H.I.V. were not uncommon. One such patient had passed peacefully. He couldn't have been more than thirty. There was no family, just the man's same-sex partner, a soft spoken young man who asked us if he could help us wrap the body.
This was unheard of. No one had ever even asked us that. Perhaps it was the boldness of the question or the sincerity in his eyes but the nurse I was working with agreed to allow him to assist as we cleaned, shrouded and tagged his dead partner.
I had not been exposed to openly gay people very much at that point in my life. Even though I thought of myself as progressive and non-judgmental, I was not even aware of my prejudices until I felt them melting away. I must have felt that being gay meant that one felt love differently, it was not real love, not a love that I could understand or relate to.
The young man calmly, almost serenely, cared for his partner's body while wiping away silent tears. I could not yet imagine loving someone that much and yet this gay man knew worlds more about loving someone than I did. Hearing him whisper his final goodbye as we covered the passed man's face with the shroud, something inside me changed. I saw things differently from that day on.
That doesn't mean I was suddenly comfortable with same-sex affection. I had a ways to go.
I don't enjoy asparagus very much either, but some people love the stuff.
Part III next week.
1 comment:
Powerful post, Joel!
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