"Peds Code Room"

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 4^th 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.