The truth…it hurts me June 12, 2008
Posted by keepbreathing in Uncategorized.trackback
We recently had a young girl in our ICU. She had been involved in a terrible motor vehicle collision and she was mangled beyond belief. Her skull was partially removed to let the brain swell, giving her head a grotesque misshapen look. Her head was shaved and her face was lacerated from windshield glass. Her body was wasted from weeks and weeks in our ICU; her eyes were shut and had not opened since her arrival at the hospital. She was clenched up in a bizarre pseudo-decorticate posture, arms and legs stiff and clenched in between our rumpled ICU blankets, head slumped in a too-big Aspen collar full of neurological drool. Looking at her was unpleasant at best and horrifying at worst. She was destroyed.
Her family brought in a photo of her and pinned it to the wall over her bed. It was a headshot, presumably a senior portrait for her high school yearbook. In the photo she was beautiful: long hair, a nice smile, eyes bright and full of life.
One day I found one of our ICU nurses staring at the picture crying. Seeing an ICU nurse cry is like seeing Rambo picking flowers. I stopped and asked her what was wrong.
She took a deep breath and sighed.
“I hate it when they bring in pictures,” she told me, ” because it makes them seem more human.”
So true! I don’t like meeting families. That’s when I think that this is someones sister, daughter, mom, etc.
Perhaps that’s one of the nice things about working for a small town hosp. We ship ‘em.
Sometimes it’s so hard to do the job….
The families think making them more human to us will get us to provide better care. This would be a valid approach if we were terrorists.
Our problem is just the opposite, the more human we make them, the harder to perform necessary uncomfortable procedures.
Um, well. There is that. But, I guess I am one of the strange ones that likes to see who they were. It helps with my closure, if I need it. But it is still sad and has made me cry on more than one occasion.
I personally like the photos. For me, they’re a reminder that the poor bugger in the bed is someone’s loved one – a reminder to care for them as well I would want my loved ones cared for.
But at the end of the day it can be so sad if you dwell on the comparison between the vibrancy of the person in the photos, and the state of the person in the bed.
One thing that I have noticed in our Pediatric ICU (and I suppose it is the same in all ICUs) is that all of our ‘trauma’ patients tend to look exactly the same, ie matted hair, swollen eyes, wide noses, fat cheeks.
And then the family brings in a picture of a smiling, mischief filled little face and it breaks my heart to see the difference in the here and now and the once was.
The only thing that makes it all worth it is when they walk out of the hospital looking like almost nothing has happened.
Argh…
Here’s to whatevers best *raises Ginger Ale*
“The only thing that makes it all worth it is when they walk out of the hospital looking like almost nothing has happened.”
Although I’m still very much a rookie, out of the many trauma patients we had, I can remember only one who ever came out of the hospital, then came back looking like nothing ever happened. MCA, full blown ARDS, c-diff, trached, PEG’ed, and then shipped out. Came back 6 months later and surprised the ICU staff, even the trauma surgeon. Only comment he had was “it was the most expensive weight loss program he ever had”….