“The weekend after Isabelle’s discharge, I take my shoes outside onto the driveway. The sky is a brilliant blue, and green tinges of leaves poke through shells of buds; the wind slips through my fleece. I scrub the spots of blood with an antibact…
Category: Critical Care
The worst code I ever ran
There is value in reflecting on the most difficult experiences, as it affords an opportunity to examine how we act, react and change in response to the forces around us. The most difficult experiences in medicine are often not discussed, as there is ty…
That time my patient swallowed an entire bag of crack
He was the middleman — the man that took the crack cocaine from the main guy, the drug dealer and then sold it to his “clients” and kept a percentage of the money for himself and the rest to the dealer. It was a fine-tuned operation. You co…
Our patients become an inextricable part of our lives
In the early evening, I stand in the grocery store checkout line. A young mother in front of me presses a pig-tailed toddler against her hip as she rummages for her credit card, and a man with silvered hair and a monogrammed shirt shifts impatiently b…
Repressed memories of a tragic ICU assignment
Sometimes, the most traumatic events happened when I was young and new and just starting my ICU career. When you least expect it, those repressed memories come glaring at you. Thinking I had tucked this tragedy away forever, and then within a flash — 2…
The degradation and devaluation of nurses
Where do I begin? Maybe at the beginning. Let’s start with the degradation and devaluation of nurses across this country. For decades, I lived the devaluing of nurses. Daily huddles from our nurse managers, ER nurses, ICU nurses, and behavioral health …
How do we explain the unexplainable? Are there words for the things we’ve experienced?
I’m usually good with words. The last year and a half of being a “front line nurse” has left me struggling to find the words. The frustration, anger, trauma, and sadness have so muddied my mind that I find it hard to sort through all of the complexitie…
The end, through the eyes of a critical care nurse
On the day you die from COVID, many things will happen. A colleague and I will enter the room to carefully prepare and clean your body. We will shut off all the IV pumps. We will turn off the ventilator. We will silence and turn off the monitor that is…
Millions of Americans without ICU doctors due to the “Biden ban”
Americans are dying in ICUs in far greater numbers than would otherwise be if not for a newly misapplied 57-year-old rule banning the only American board-certified ICU doctors available in many cities from providing critical care, leaving only nurses t…
The horror of keeping a loved one alive at all costs
He was in his ICU bed without movement or brain stem involvement. His weight was down to 90 pounds. His six-foot frame and skeletal body made me gasp. After countless sessions with the patient’s daughter to make her 92-year-old dad “comfort…
