Echo Heron - CONDITION CRITICAL: The Story of a Nurse Continues

The Story of a Nurse Continues

Echo Heron

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NONFICTION:

INTENSIVE CARE; The Story of a Nurse

TENDING LIVES; Nurses Working on the Medical Front

FICTION:

MERCY

HISTORICAL FICTION:

NOON AT TIFFANYS

MYSTERIES:

The Adele Monsarrat Medical Mystery Series:

PULSE

PANIC

PARADOX

FATAL DIAGNOSIS

Copyright 2014 by Echo Heron

All rights reserved

Published in the United States by Heron Quill Press, LLC

CONDITION CRITICAL:

The Story of a Nurse Continues

ISBN: 978-1-938439-94-0

Previous editions published by Ballantine Books and Ivy Books, imprints of Random House Publishing Group, Inc.

First Hardcover Edition: July 1994 First Mass Market Edition: July 1995

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-49058

Cover design: Aldren Gamalo /

Cover photo: Steven Vermillion

Formatting: Polgarus Studio

www.EchoHeron.com

For Kathleen Coffey Heron

Nurse, wife, mother, sister and friend of the first order

I have written this book to describe for the reader my experiences, thoughts, and feelings about my life as a critical care nurse. I have borrowed from true incidents and have based most of the scenes and all of the medical stories on actual events.

With the exception of a few individuals (for example: my son Simon, Jane Justice, David, and me), I have used fictitious names and characteristics for all the patients, family members, doctors, and other health-care providers, hospitals, schools, and institutions. In some cases I have also combined characteristics from several individuals and have altered the chronology of events. Thus, this book is not intended to record events as historical fact, nor is it meant to focus criticism on any particular group, individual, or institution. Any resemblances the reader may imagine they discern are unintended and entirely coincidental.

Condition Critical was originally published in 1994. It was taken out of print some years later and the rights were reverted back to me in 2010. Since that time, Ive made revisions in order to streamline the writing, although I did not change the technical/medical information.

The reader should bear in mind that present attitudes and knowledge in the medical community are quite different from those of the time period in which this book takes place, (mid-1980s to early 1990s). Public awareness of the AIDS epidemic was relatively new. Paranoia due to lack of information and effective treatment, was rampant in both the public and the medical communities. AZT was still in clinical trials, (as were the thrombolytics such as Streptokinase and tPA). In short, some of the attitudes, therapeutic methods, treatments, and medications mentioned in this book are now outdated and no longer appropriate.

Echo Heron

San Francisco, 2014

She sings softly to the teenager with the crushed skull while documenting the inevitable fraying of his hold on life. She tends to his broken young body, whispering questions she knows will go unanswered forever. Can you hear us? Did you feel any pain? What was your last thought?

It is only a matter of hours before death renders her powerless. Until then, his life flows through her hands and into her heart. Later, with his soul still fresh in her keeping, despair comes to fill her sleepless night, tormenting her with the sounds of his mothers pleadingsOh God, why my son? Please, not my son. Then comes the vision of a weeping sister too young to understand why her favorite brother no longer laughs or calls her my little bratty.

Regardless of whether this nurse has yet found that delicate balance of compassion and hopelessness, detachment and intimacy, she will choose, of her own free will, to return again tomorrow. Her need to nurture is not something she can turn away from, no matter how much it hurts. As a healer, she sees only that she may be given the chance to steal a child away from death, or perhaps it will be her touch alone that will soothe the fears and aches of some ancient soul.

And when she wipes the sweat of suffering from your face, she is not concerned with whether you are a Jew or a Catholic, a Protestant or an atheist, but only that you are freed from your pain. When she holds you in her arms delivering you to the peace of death, her thoughts are not of whether you lived in a cardboard box or in a castle, but that you have comfort and dignity.

When she ministers to your broken body, she does not care about the color of your skin, but only that you are made whole. When you are afraid, she speaks with gentle understanding, unmindful of whether you are a prostitute or a priest, for she herself knows well the singular loneliness of fear.

That intimate stranger at your bedside is not only your nurse, she is your sister, your mother, your confessor, and your healer. It is not the medicine or the treatment that cures your ills; it is her caring that heals.

Nurses see things, the afterimages of which will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But they are not hardened monsters. On the contrary, they each carry a courageous and sympathetic heart inside them always, so that when you look into a nurses face, you are looking into the face of human compassion; a human being who still sends a silent prayer each time a siren sounds.

And you, the layperson, you who live on the normal side of life, in the end you always ask: How can nurses bear to do what they do? Why do they keep choosing to face the sorrow and the horror day after day? How can they continue to care when it hurts so much?

In answer, there is one universal truth about the true giver: Nurses are able to do what they do because they are rich in the gifts of healing, compassion, and love.

Nurses we speak with our eyes, teach with our hands, comfort with our presence.

EUNICE K. M. ERNST, R.N.

Running back to Mr. Keillers room under a mountainous pile of clean linen, I noticed bubbles oozing out from the sides of my nursing shoesthe result of having doused them with an excessive amount of germicidal soap and not gotten it all out in the rinse. I made the mistake of stopping long enough to brush away the suds, thus making myself visible instead of a moving blur. Mrs. Normans son headed straight for me like a bullet rushing toward a sitting duck.

Mrs. Norman had been my patient since her admission to Redwoods Memorials coronary care unit two weeks earlier with an extensive myocardial infarction, otherwise referred to as an MI, or, simply stated, a heart attack. For a moment I thought about dodging into the patients room immediately to my left, but I knew Mr. Norman would wait until I came out. He was, like his mother with the call bell, a persistent person. Besides, I couldnt afford the time to play cat and mouse; Redwoods Memorials CCU was in its usual state of pandemonium and we were understaffed. The four-bed acute unit and fourteen-bed intermediate unit were fulla result of the emergency room having done its job too well.

Nine of our seventeen patients had been admitted since eleven a.m., and it was only 4:30 in the afternoon. Adding to the chaos were the five patients in intermediate CCU who were more than sick enough to be on the acute side. True, there were the three intermediate patients who were stable enough to be turfed out to other units, but the process of contacting all the doctors involved on each case, then convincing them that their patient was ready to move on, was more time-consuming than we could afford. If this werent enough, the patients on intermediate seemed to be having a call bell contest. Since the three p.m. shift change, the nurses figured each patient was using his call bell an average of five times per hour. Thats a lot of bells for three nurses to answer.