Morning’s
slowing down, I guess I’ll go put away the cardiac monitor cables.
God what a fucking mess in here, how hard is it to things away
neatly?!
“Peds
Code?!”
“What?”
“We’re
looking for the peds code room,” the medics blurt out rolling in
with a patient with CPR in progress.
“Right
here, you’re in the right room.”
“12-year
old male, unknown downtime, found face-down in the bathtub.”
My
heart sinks, he’s already cool to the touch and mottled.
I
take over compressions as the nurse pushes the 4th Epi.
“Let
me see what we have,” the physician asks me to pause – the
monitor flatlines. He asks the medics, “did you have anything
in the field?”
“No,
nothing, asystole since we found him.”
The
doc intubates with difficulty, the jaw is already becoming slightly
stiff; the ET tube gurgles from the fluid in the lungs.
It’s
hopeless and everyone knows it but no one wants to call it on a kid.
Time
of death is called, we quickly clean up the body & set up some
chairs for the family.
The
sleepy, morning calm of the ER is shattered by a mother’s
devastating screams.
Next
begins the self preservation – we ask others how they’re doing in
order to ignore our own emotional turmoil, we tend to the survivors’
tears to suppress our own, those new in the field try to make sense
of what’s happened, the experienced ones deal with it in their own
ways. We decompress, we move on, we act distant, we bottle it
up, we drink, we smoke, we work out, we cheat on our spouses, we get
out the emergency stash of chocolate (for some too far gone, the
stash of Xanax or Fentanyl). No matter what we do we know this
evil is here to stay, and some days are good and the Grim Reaper
loses, some days not so good, and always, we are left to bear witness
and help a family pick up the pieces.
