A day in the life

I haven't told you all that much about my job since I started blogging again. My job is a big part of my life, and when I am not at work I am often thinking of work and my patients. So, in that case, I feel compelled to tell you about what I do.

When I started nursing school, I went with the intentions of one day getting a job in CVRU. Being in CVRU during my dad's open heart surgery was one of the catapulting reasons I went back to school to be a nurse. When I was offered a job in this unit immediately out of nursing school, many prayers were answered, and one of my dreams had been fulfilled.

I absolutely love my job. I could not imagine working anywhere else. I just never knew what kind of a toll it would take on me, emotionally.

Our patients come to us directly from the operating room. They do not go to a designated recovery; we are the recovery room essentially - cardiovascular recovery unit (CVRU). When the heart patients come back they are always on a ventilator and are always unconscious from sedation. They are immediately hooked up to about a thousand wires and tubes, and we are monitoring them second by second. We have a tool that even allows us to read measurements directly from their heart, because there is an actual monitoring device IN the heart. It is a very complex system, but obviously its for the best of our patients.

The families are often scared to death when they come in for the first time and take a look at their loved one covered in what I call the "spaghetti" of the tubes and wires, as well as the one large tube going down the throat to assist their breathing. I won't lie, when I saw my dad for the first time, I burst out crying. Yes, its pretty horrifying to someone who might not know what is going on.

Luckily our patients often only stay this way for about 12 hours, then are up in the chair and walking. That, to me, is such a reward. We work very hard to keep them stable throughout the night, and our reward at the end of the day is to get them up to the chair and let them walk first thing in the morning. This, of course, is after they have been off the ventilator for a while.

What I wanted to tell you about most, is how emotional it is. Not every patient in our unit successfully makes it through the open heart surgery process. We have a very low mortality rate, but we do have some who perish. In the months I have been there I have assisted with many "codes" where a patient expires and we do everything possible to bring them back to life. Unfortunately, none of the codes I have seen have been alive when all was said and done. Until last week, I had not had a patient of mine to die.

My patient had been in the hospital for a while and had just failed to thrive after OHS (open heart surgery). She was on and off the ventilator 2 times, before we had to put her back on it the last time for good. We knew she wasn't doing well. I had taken care of her many times, and I had become close to her and her family. I think they really did appreciate me and the work I was doing to help her.

I went into work one night last week, and when I got report on my patient, I knew that she wouldn't make it long, if she even made it through the night. I had a long, dreaded talk with her family, urging them not leave her, trying to explain that I didn't have a good feeling. Understandably, they had more hope than I had, and decided to go home for the night. At about 4 am the next morning, I had to make the dreaded phone call telling them they needed to come, their mother was not going to be alive much longer. My voice cracked at the end of the call, and I know her daughter heard the hurt in my voice. That was my very first phone call like that, and it was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

I didn't have time to cry, I just hoped I had it in me to keep their mother alive long enough for them to get there and love on her before she went on to heaven. Luckily, her family got there around 5 am and she lived until around 11 am, after I had ended my shift.

Since I have been in CVRU, this has been the hardest thing for me to deal with. It is not easy to see people struggling for their life on a daily/weekly basis. So many people have asked me, does it get easier to deal with. I have only been working in CVRU for 8 months, but no, it has never gotten easier. My answer to that question, though, is that I hope it never gets easier. Death is not something I ever want to be sensitized to, nor do I ever want to take it lightly.

I love my job, I love the people I work with, I love the patients I work with, and I love the opportunity I have been given. I know that God has placed me in this place for a reason, and I will continue to seek His will in those hard times, in all times. I hope that if nothing else, God can use me to be a Christian influence to those families that are going through the difficult times, which are almost all the patients we see.

Pray for me as I continue to follow this plan for my life that has been laid before me. I am so blessed to be chosen for this opportunity.