As I Lay Dying

So, bear with me.

Sometime last night, I was thinking about stuff, and counting on my fingers (because I can't do real math. If I could, I'd be a scientist. Or maybe a mad scientist. Wait, if I was a mad scientist, I wouldn't need to do real math. Wait! I can be a mad scientist now! Splendid!)

So I realized it's been five whole years since I graduated college. Of course, that realization begged the question: What have you been doing all this time? And then I thought: oh yeah, grad school. Then some more grad school. Then taking nursing boards and getting a job that nearly killed me.

Oh yeah. All that stuff.

But still, who cares? (Hint. Answer: No one).

The sad thing is, I do feel older (saying "mature" sounds too pompous for this occasion). Work has had a lot to do with that feeling. Watching people die slow and painful deaths, putting up with life-and-death stress, managing pscyho patients and placating even more psychotic family members, dealing with dismissive and rude--not to mention sometimes downright negligent--attendings, cleaning up poo off the floor and walls because "housekeeping won't do it, it's not their job" and dealing with every piece of petty rubbish no one else wants to... it's taken its toll.

I do feel "older." Seeing a basically dead, already necrotizing kid in multi-system organ failure having also suffered a massive brain stroke, kept on a ventilator and max pressors for a week before his power-of-attorney decides to withdraw care... it'll do that to a person.

Caring for that kid when he was conscious was almost worse, because you knew no matter what you did, the kid was going to die. His name should have been Lazarus, he'd been coded so many times. I said to a nurse, "You know this is going to end in one of two scenarios: Either the kid codes and dies on our floor, or we transfer him back to ICU again and he codes and dies there." Turns out his course of death chose door number two, except he didn't really code, because we hadn't left anything viable enough to code.

I remember pulling thick, leathery calluses of dead skin off of his sore-ridden, rotting feet and thinking, 'Jamie, what in the hell are you doing?! It's not like he's ever going to get out of bed again."

But I felt I had to, because what mother would want to see her son's feet like that, all corpse like? And then I remembered, he was rumored to be an illegal immigrant, and as far as I know, no blood relative ever came to visit him the entire hospital stay, and it was months. (It's a bad sign when, during report, the ICU nurse says, "Don't write the length-of-stay history down; we've got it all on a calendar we'll send over with the patient's chart.")

That's the kind of stuff that can get down inside of you and whittle away every bit of faith you have in humanity, let alone a Being greater than yourself.

I can't remember what it was like to be naiive of this kind of suffering. The conversations I had in divinity school about "human and divine suffering" sound even more artificial and arrogant than they did back before my daily job description often involved dealing with situations of moral and mortal peril.

Ironically, the other day a patient's son said to me, "God is good!"

He obviously hadn't met the daughter of a patient who was in that same room two days later, whose husband was diagnosed with a cancer that was stage four by the time he felt ill, and died a few months before their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Both were young, in their forties, with teenage children. They were planning a vow renewal ceremony this summer. Her mother told me all this, sadly, when her daughter had left the room after a painful, stilted visit. I could sense bitterness and hurt radiating from the daughter, but couldn't think of why until her mother told me the backstory.

I have no idea what to make of all this, and can only look to "The Roots" lyrics for inspiration:

The crack can only kill you if you let it.