#the RT joked that maybe we should start saving people's last sputum too | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tanjir0se · 4 months

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tw: death, medical procedures

hey my job kinda like. sucks ass sometimes lol. ive been doing it for almost 5 years and sometimes it still takes the fucking breath out of my lungs man.

i'm standing toward a pt and her husband. heart monitor display is between us. i can see it fall into sawtooth tachy (pulseless) and he can't. I'm literally watching the big flashing 0 for her heart rate. the ICU nurse came running in and that made him catch on and he's asking us "what? what is it!? what's happening!?" and i'm not an ICU nurse so i'm just fucking standiing there and staring at the monitor with my mouth open like an idiot (she was DNR, there's nothing we could have done) while the primary nurse approaches the bed and tells him what's happening

I kind of like. back out of the room bc i can no longer do my job on someone who is. yknow. not alive. And i'm not about to dismantle all my equipment with all of this happening, so my part of the job is done.

He begins crying (obviously) which was bad enough but as I circled back around to start charting a quick note i passed the room andhe's. Lying in her bed holding her and just. fucking. wailing. Like screaming. So fucking loud and just this awful sound. It was so bad, like nothing i've ever seen before. I could hear him from my equipment room like five doors down with the door shut. It was so awful I just finished my work ran out of the ICU and to my car.

For the first time since I've been a nurse (I was a nurse all through COVID and saw plenty of shit then too) I just. Closed my car door and fucking cried. I cried all the way home. Like fucking sobbed. i've never cried over a pt and i've had plenty of moments similar to this. I don't even remember the pts name and never learned her husbands. i've literally done compressions on someone and felt their ribs snap, i've had to tell family their loved one has died, had people tell me they didn't want to die, watched COVID take really young people but this just. it just. fuck. got me for some reason.

#idk i wanted to get this off my chest #the xray tech and RT outside were joking about whether or not people should get tattoos of their loved one's last EKG #the RT joked that maybe we should start saving people's last sputum too #they're laughing to each other literally like. over the sound of this husband screaming.#and this isn't a condemnation of other healthcare workers it's just utterly startling sometimes how carefully we've compartmentalized #bc if we react like i did to every single patient we'd be doing it all the time and would never survive in the medical field #ive heard ppl say house or other shows is unrealistic bc 'no medical provider would talk like that'#yes we do and we probably say worse/more callous things #only difference is we don't say it to the patient/family's face #its so fucked up but it's how we survive #thank god im in therapy

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