It has been quiet on the home front, where I split my time
between sleep, commuting, and work. In some ways, I am as tired as ever,
but the RN job has given a meaning to tiredness in a way that television shows,
studying and long walks cannot.
The inpatient unit electrifies me, so choc-full of tales just pulsing away under my fingertips. I've been meaning to sit down and write more of them out before I forget, because they make such wonderfully complex characters, these people. However, it's difficult to a) get the time and b) respect the ever looming threat of HIPAA. I end up having to fudge and reinvent everything so that the people I talk about are not the people I see, which is a little sad, because eventually I forget the real details. In retrospect, I don't know if the reality is more important than the feel of their stories. I can't preserve history, but I can memorialize moments, problems, emotions that are common to more than one person. Perhaps they both have their places.
The inpatient unit electrifies me, so choc-full of tales just pulsing away under my fingertips. I've been meaning to sit down and write more of them out before I forget, because they make such wonderfully complex characters, these people. However, it's difficult to a) get the time and b) respect the ever looming threat of HIPAA. I end up having to fudge and reinvent everything so that the people I talk about are not the people I see, which is a little sad, because eventually I forget the real details. In retrospect, I don't know if the reality is more important than the feel of their stories. I can't preserve history, but I can memorialize moments, problems, emotions that are common to more than one person. Perhaps they both have their places.
The work is difficult, and busy, and I don't always care for
it, but those stories are what make me want to stay. I want to know what happens next, and
it's frightening to know that I influence the plot. There is so much more
weight to a story when it involves a soul.
It puzzles me to think that my daily tasks occur in the defining events of people's
lives. The people I meet are those who are questioning themselves, their loved
ones, their purposes. They are trying to reassemble shards of lives unready to be interrupted. These humans are fragile. They hold me in awe. Yet we have
the audacity to push them forwards, to wash their changed bodies, to chart the
fluctuations in the endless taking of vital signs.
The simple collection of human experience on the unit
takes my breath away. It is the non-glamorous plodding to clean up train wrecks, suicide attempts, accidents, attempted murder, strokes,
surgeries gone awry. These are not people who expected illness at all. They
were people on vacation, making dinner, visiting grandchildren,
driving to soccer, having babies, performing at concerts.
They are not always good people, or good situations or good endings,
but they are good stories. Beautiful stories.
As C.S. Lewis says, "There are no ordinary people. You
have never met a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are
mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat."
I look at my patients, and I know this is quite true.
Working in The Pit