Part 1

I told myself I wouldn’t write about this, but when you have so much ready to pour over, its hard not to organize your thoughts down onto paper… or screen.

This and next week, I am doing a nursing clinical at the main trauma hospital in the city; it is thursday and I am already entirely worn out, both physically, psychologically and emotionally.

I shall start from the beginning just so you understand the personal trauma I have gone through.

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Monday rolls around and we are to meet at 0630 in front of the coffee shop in the lobby. I meet up with my friend and am pleased to see her, knowing that this clinical is going to be a great learning curve.

We get up to the unit and find that we will be shadowing a nurse and the patients that she is caring for for the day so we get a quick feel of the ropes. I meet two remarkably different individuals, both of whom opened my eyes in different ways.

The first was a sullen man who was lying on his back, absolutely refusing to get up. While he was wearing a neck brace, a memento from a tragic (actually, not just for the drama) story, he keeps claiming that he is sick and tired from being tossed around like a piece of wood.

Well dear, I wanted to say, it is because of this nice pressure ulcer on your coccyx that we are indeed turning you around, and if we dont use at least a small degree of force, you aren’t going to be able to turn, cause its not like you actually help us.

The man is clinically depressed and suicidal, but honestly, who are you helping by refusing to eat your meals? However, now that I see and smell them, hospital food looks much worse than I remember.

He was, in all its entirety, an extremely frustrating individual. The comments kept streaming that ‘He can’t take life anymore. He can’t take being tossed and turned like a piece of wood. Nothing will change. He can’t take life anymore. He can’t take being tossed and turned….’ It continued like this for several moments before he finally tuckered himself out, shut his eyes and I took his SpO₂.

Next door was the complete opposite. This was a man, sitting upright in his wheelchair facing a colossal Mac screen on the windowsill talking to a partner in business on skype. They were talking about transferring an old site from some far off land closer to home so that it can be reestablished and revamped; even in hospital (he had been here for several months) he was extremely tuned in with the outside world. When we came in to do his dressing change, that was when I discovered why he had been admitted to hospital.

This individual had spine cancer, a giant gaping hole in his back from where they tried to take the tumour off of his vertebrates and this poor wound wouldn’t heal because of the radiation therapy he was currently going through. But the vivacious vitality of his optimism widened my eyes. He would not go down without a fight. People could tell him that chemo would not work and that the odds were extremely out of whack. That he would die in a year. That he would be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

While I was chatting with the man, he made it explicitly clear that he had every intention of going through with chemo, even if it meant he had to die. If he was going to move on in 10 months, he said it was alright. He had led a bright and wonderful life: he just was under no circumstances ready to leave now.

And to boot, I was standing at the counter charting when who walks by with his walker? My friend from room 2.

All I could say was beautiful.