Our days are full. Sometimes not full of anything that feels particularly productive, but full. A 1- and 3-year old combined are a full-time job, no joking, and with one of us working full-time and the other home with the kids, that pretty much takes up our time! I can't imagine what it would be like with both of us working full-time, as many parents do.
I have settled in the IMCU (intermediate care unit, a step down from the ICU but still more critical than the general medical/surgical floors), where I will do an extended period of "internship." I work with my own team of patients and am a staff nurse in that unit in every sense of the word. The goal is technically still the ICU, and it is expected that after a few months I'll be better prepared for the rigors of the ICU. The ICU is certainly very, very intense and very invasive. I'm not sure what I feel about that. The loss of dignity any patient suffers when they are splayed naked on a table with needles poking into them, electric shocks permeating their body, and literally bone crunching calisthenics practiced by a medical professional bothers me. Especially when the survival rates of people undergoing such practices are extremely low, and even if "surviving," a patient may just barely get back to "alive." People usually suffer death or permanent damage following such an episode. Do you know anyone who has "survived a code" in the hospital? Is it worth trying at ANY cost to restart a heart beat in an essentially dead body? I am quite certain I wish to be a DNR but I'm still thinking about any exceptions there might be so I haven't made it official. It's scary to think of not being "resuscitated" but it's a scary thing to be dead to begin with, and so being a DNR is really just a way of avoiding all of the suffering that will go along with death if resuscitation should be necessary. Resuscitation does not return life to normal. Limited intubation might be OK for me, though, so I'm still on the fence about what I will specify.
I'd love to hear any thoughts on the ethics of intensive medicine as we practice it in the USofA.
On the other hand, I really do love the job I'm doing right now and I'm happy to be there :) I have been on my own for a few months now and usually I feel good about my work nights. Occasionally things are pretty overwhelming, but nurses who have been doing this for a long time say there are always those nights where everything seems to go haywire and there isn't enough time to do everything.
The girls are well, though Tass has a cold, and Porter is busy doing home improvement projects and getting the girls here and there to classes, parks, and the library. Life just keeps rolling on...
Glad things are going so well.
ReplyDeleteMy mother died in the summer of 2013 of ovarian cancer. Her last eight weeks were really made substantially worse by the treatments she had for the cancer -- for some reason the doctor hadn't bothered to tell her about the mean length of survival for a diagnosis at Stage III. I think she was happier once she "gave up". When this happens to me, as surely it will, I plan to refuse treatment and move to a hospice for the end.
Thank you SL! My grandmother died of ovarian cancer over 10 years ago. I don't remember all of the details but her treatment was very difficult.
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