Time to Reflect

Some days I am reminded of why I left bedside nursing.  It's not just being constantly exposed to horrible infections or back-breaking work, the work bruises my soul.  There is such a fine line between being calloused by the brokenness I see and feeling each and every blow that these bodies have been dealt.

Even in this job, seemingly removed from the patient side of things, I am still bearing witness to the worst moments of these people's lives.  What is a routine day for me is the one where their life, in many respects, ends.

There is a sadness that has fallen over our command center.  The seat that Deb sat in is empty and all of us seem to be consciously, or unconsciously, avoiding it.  The laptop computer still remains, but the person is missing.  I try to imagine what that is like--to have everything I have known and planned on, change in a heartbeat and then I want to forget.  Some days I am grateful for being alone.  While I would still love to fall in love and marry, in a sense, I am protected from this level of heartbreak.  He wasn't just her husband, they had literally grown up together.  They had known and loved each other more years than they hadn't.  All the dreams they had built for the future are gone.  There will be no grandkids for them to take joy in together or vacations, just the two of them.  No breaking of ground on their dream home for retirement or Alaskan cruises.  All that has ended.  I feel such a tremendous amount of sadness for her which makes all the other insults on humanity this week (suspicious death of an infant, several rapes, and an MVA so horrible that it literally crushed this man's head) worse.  There is a reason I left bedside nursing.  I still have my humanity and I can't separate what I see from what I feel without feeling like I have lost something of me.