March has become a bittersweet month for me. With the loss of my mother a year ago and all of the critically ill patients that have passed on, it has brought the subject of death and dying into clear focus. Arriving home one night several weeks ago after helping a colleague titrate some drips on a young, dying lymphoma patient, I started thinking of all of the people I have been with while they were dying. I started to cry as their faces flashed in front of me. Sometimes, I was the only one with them, standing at the bedside, holding their cold hand waiting for their heart to fail. When looking down the path of death, some families do not have the emotional strength to be present stating, “call me when it’s over” before they walk away. On that night, I decided to sit and write to help me express what I was feeling. This is a bit of what came out:
Today was a very challenging day.
We had some patients that needed their lives saved and we had a patient to let go.
A young man maybe 39 or 40 dying of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that overtook his brain and made it bleed.
He had a young child just a year old.
He had a wife, a mother and some brothers.
They were there with him; so was his father.
How sad was I to see him there so still and unaware; unaware of the drips, all of the effort, and us.
At least the family was with this young man. So many people die without their loved ones; sometimes it’s because family just isn’t around, sometimes they decide not be around. I’ve always thought that when a family decided not to be around, the patient was dying alone. Then one day a very dear friend told me, ‘The patient didn’t die alone, you were there.’ For some reason that made me feel better for their lives. The lives they lived, the children they raised, the families they were a part of.
The burden we feel as caregivers is heavy at times. The rewards are immeasurable. Finding the middle ground amongst it all is sometimes difficult. For me, just knowing that one life has breathed easier because of the effort has made it all worthwhile.
Michelle Thomas RN, BLS, ACLS, PALS, TNCC, EAGALA Level I
