I walked into work one day and one of our little patients went into respiratory arrest right as I finished getting report on her.  We spent the next 12 hours saving the life of this poor little girl.

The patient had been born with problems (though all these years later I have no idea what they were) and was blind and deaf.  In fact, she was non-responsive.  She had been in the hospital since birth.  Her mother was already pregnant with child number four and hadn’t been to see her in several months.  It was her father who had been faithful in holding vigil and wanted everything possible done for her.

It wasn’t the intensity of the day that sent me running.  It wasn’t the profound sadness either.  It was the fact that we put this 6-month-old through hell for the entire shift.  Sure we kept her alive, but I felt no pride in that.  I was so conflicted during the entire shift.  I worked my tail off to keep this child alive while praying the entire time she would die and wake up in heaven.

She finally died, but not for another two weeks.  Not until we had spent a few hundred thousand more dollars and put that child through every imaginable horror.

It was ethics that finally made me resign.  It seemed wrong that all I truly wanted for this child was release from this life though I worked heroically to keep her in it.  I finally decided a good PICU nurse should only think about life, so I moved to Colorado and started a career in Family Practice.

I would handle such internal conflict differently now.  Maturity of self and career gives one perspective only time allows for.  The truth is, much of life is filled with ethical dilemmas, but we, as medical professionals, seem to face them on a routine basis.

Have you had some situations like mine?  How did you handle them?  Do any of them still haunt you?

I came across the story of another nurse who faces a similar conflict.  You can find it at http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/a-nurses-distress-over-a-dying-patient/?hp

It’s so helpful to all of us when we see ourselves in other people’s stories.  It makes us feel like we’re not alone, wrong, or just plain crazy.  Take a few minutes and share your story with us.

One afternoon I was napping in my cabin when someone came in screaming for me. They said there had been an accident in the kitchen. As I arrived seconds later, I saw a teenage boy lying face down with his hand clenched in a big floor fan, which was lying beside him. I checked to make sure the fan was unplugged before I touched him. I unclenched his hand and rolled him over. He made some noise as I turned him, but soon realized he wasn’t breathing. Nor did he have a pulse.

The other nurse arrived, and we started CPR. Ten minutes later the ambulance arrived and took him away. We heard an hour or so later that he had died. Electrocution. He was seventeen.

It was a pivotal point in my life. I spent weeks rocking myself to sleep doing the CPR count in my head: One and two and three and four…every night. I couldn’t get his face out of my head. I was tormented by the fact that everything I knew had failed me. Failed him. I thought maybe I had picked the wrong profession after all. It was my first encounter with losing a patient, and it hurt like hell. It will be 25 years this July–and it still hurts.

We go into nursing to help people. We want to save lives. We want to make a difference.

The first time we find out it doesn’t always turn out the way we would like, we have to re-up. We have to make a conscious decision to stick with it and try again. It can be a painful process. But the truth is, people die. Sometimes way too young. Sometimes in horrible ways. Sometimes because we screwed up. It’s all a huge load to bear.

A couple weeks after the accident, I had to teach a CPR class to a group of high school campers. It seemed like a cruel joke that I would have to pass on this skill that had failed the only time I had ever used it. However, I did my best to be positive about all they were learning as I shared my own experience. I had five kids in the class, and I knew two of them from home.

That fall one of them saved a choking child she was babysitting, and the other did CPR on her own father when he had a heart attack! To me, that was the affirmation I needed to keep going. I can’t save everyone, but I can impact everyone. My own story didn’t end well, but I changed two other peoples’ stories. And theirs ended great.

Even as a child, I had the heart of a nurse.

As a student nurse, I stood making a patient’s bed while he was in surgery and bawled because he was having a resection for colon cancer and would return with a colostomy. He was devastated and, so, it seemed, was I.

As a PICU nurse, I stood by an 8-year-old liver transplant patient as she slipped from this world. Her family had already said their good-byes and waited in the lounge. I simply could not leave her alone. I stayed until the final heartbeat, stroking her head and telling her it was okay to let go.

The need to comfort and help a hurting soul is what this profession is all about. It’s what our patients need from us, and it’s what we ourselves need to give.

Some of my favorite memories of nursing are those special moments when I’ve felt invested in a patient’s life. I’ve cried many tears with patients and families, sometimes over a positive pregnancy test, sometimes over a deathbed.

If you’re in nursing, you have stories of your own. We would love for you to share one that shows your own nurse’s heart.