We do what we can.

Work on Saturday was a dream. I hadn't had such a wonderful day at work in a long time. I actually had fun, and it was slow. In the span of 12 hours, I started ONE IV, took ONE patient to XRay, drew blood ONCE, and took ONE patient to CAT Scan. That's it. Usually days like those drag on, with each tick of the clock feeling like one year, for lack of nothing to do. Luckily, it was a great crew, which helped time FLY.

I should have known Sunday was going to be a crappy day at work, just because fate likes to balance out the good with the bad, and something had to counteract the greatness of Saturday.

It wasn't the busiest day I've had, I'll admit that. It was busy enough, though, and to top it off I had two really intense cases which drained me physically and emotionally.

First, I'll talk about the drunk girl. We received a call from Fire Rescue saying we were about to get an alcohol poisoning patient. A few minutes later, the 15 year old girl rolls in, practically unconscious. She was so out of it that she even reminded me of a CP (Cerebral Palsy) patient. Reportedly, she was at an apartment complex pool with a friend of hers, at around 10 am, swimming and drinking. She's lucky she didn't drown to death. According to the police, she was upset that she wasn't able to go to the prom the night before. I assume that's why she was drinking so early in the morning.

We did the works on this girl. Started an IV, drew some blood, inserted a Foley Catheter, placed an NG (nasogastric) tube to pump her stomach, etc etc... You name it, we did it.
You could smell the tequila on her breath from a mile away.

I was eager to get the results for the alcohol levels in her bloodstream, since we knew it was going to be a ridiculously high number. An hour later, we get the results back. The girl had an alcohol level of 2.44. The legal limit in the state of Florida is 0.08. She's lucky she didn't die.

One thing that really got to me was the mother's rection to the ordeal. She was completely clueless as to the gravity of the entire situation. I was in the room performing an EKG on the girl, and all the while I'm explaining to the mother what's going to be happening in the next couple of hours. I inform her that we will be admitting her daughter to the Intensive Care Unit, and she is completely dumbfounded. Her jaw drops, and she asks "what? how come??" I proceed to explain to her how high the alcohol level in her daughter was, etc. etc. She responds with "Are you kidding me?! God, all she did was drink... What's the big deal??", in a very offensive tone. At this point I wanted to strangle the mother for being so incompetent. Judging from her reaction to everything, I started to sympathize with the daughter...Obviously there are problems at home that need to be dealt with properly. The mother is clearly not meeting her child's needs.

When the girl finally came to, I could tell she wanted to talk to me about her issues. She was sobbing, asking me why she had so many problems in her life...why she was so stupid as to do this and add more problems to her life. I wanted to sit there and listen to her and provide some sort of comfort, but the mother remained in the room, and I didn't want the girl to get too detailed in case the mother freaked out or something. Social work will handle the problem during her stay at the hospital. I hope she gets the help she needs.

The other patient I had almost brought me to tears; an 11 year old boy with AML (Acute Myelogenous Leukemia- for more info, go to http://www.marrow.org/PATIENT/aml.html).
He's what we call a "Frequent Flyer" in the Pediatric ER due to his debilitating disease. I've seen him go from good to bad to worse, and this time when he came in you could already tell that death was on its way. I don't mean to be so grotesque and grim about it, but it's the truth. His skin was an ashy gray color, his nails brittle, his lips so chapped they were scabbed everywhere, his gums swollen and bleeding, his body skinny and weak, his face swollen from all the medication, his port sites on his chest black and blue down to his arms.

It's so hard to come to terms with terminal patients, because your job as a nurse/EMT is to help people get better, improve, and attain a higher quality of life. With them, all you can do is make them as comfortable as possible so they can go peacefully. You feel helpless, especially with children because they have so much to live for. Their entire lives were SUPPOSED to be ahead of them. This poor boy will never see his 21st birthday, he won't get to experience the beautiful things in life that come later...party with friends, finish school, choose a career, have a family, fall in love, experience the increasing wisdom that comes with getting older, bask in the beauty of a sunset or the moonlight... So unfair.

All of this leads me to the question of why these children, with such seemingly bright futures at birth, are put on this earth. What is their purpose? To teach the rest of us how to deal? To teach us to appreciate every moment that our heart beats and our chest expands to give us life for another second? Have they accomplished their purpose in such a short time? So many questions we may never know the answers to.

Those of us in the medical field are not the creators of life. Nor are we the destroyers (though some would argue this point). Rather, we try to be the enhancers and prolongers of life, and though life will run its course as it wishes (regardless of our efforts) it never gets easier to deal with the loss of one life. At least for me.

Though doctors, nurses, researchers, chemists, etc., have continued to perform "miracles" to save people, the ones that slip through the crack remind us of our fallible humanity.

We are not superheroes, and life is a fragile, precious thing.