Welcome to my world

Hi. I am an ER nurse, actually a RN, certified in emergency nursing. I love my job, every day, sometimes every hour or even every minute is different. There are times when I comfort, times when I administer life saving medications, times when I use paddles or pads to jump start a patient's heart from a life ending to life saving rhythm.

Yet, there are times, too many times, when I must perform aggressive life saving treatments to a patient who is dying. This is why I am writing this blog. Instead of providing comfort care to someone who is at the end of his or her life, perhaps because of a terminal illness but more often simply because that person's life is at an end due to advanced age and all the many medical problems that can no longer provide this person with any sort of quality of life.

Too many television shows such as ER have led people to believe that just by entering the emergency room of a hospital, even a level one trauma center where I work, will somehow magically transform a person who is at the end of life into an entirely new person, one without the many medical problems that brought him or her there.

We owe those whom we love the opportunity to be comfortable at the end of his or her life. We can do that. In fact, as a nurse I am obligated under the nurses "Code of Ethics" to do just that. But, families instead choose to make decisions that prolong that dying person's life. Really, sadly, that person then is poked and prodded with many tubes and interventions until finally the family is ready.

I will share with you stories, my stories or more aptly, the stories of those with whom I come in contact with every day. For example, an elderly man with lung cancer that had spread to his other organs came in unresponsive. He was so thin and gaunt, he could not even close his mouth, he had an audible "death rattle" - because he was so weak and near death he could not even cough to move any of his secretions. Did we make him comfortable so that he could pass on? Well, no we did not .... not until we were able to secure THREE physicians who agreed that indeed this man was dying. In the meantime, he received one aggressive treatment after another....by me. This is not why I became a nurse.

More to come.