So I'm getting more and more immersed in this whole "health care" thing. It's a little creepy how calloused everybody is, especially since I've frequently heard that to be a nurse you have to be super-empathic. It's chilling to contemplate how much constant exposure to human pain has dulled their emotions, and was even more chilling when I considered what would happen to a "normal" person. If the best, most compassionate of us can't handle this, who can? And what happens when someone not super-compassionate becomes a nurse? I know they must be out there, but I can only hope they all quit before they can do too much damage.

It's actually very calm in an emergency room - nurses move sedately about, even in a code blue (cardiac arrest). I guess because people have dealt with these issues so many times before, they become commonplace. When I was riding along in an ambulance the other day, we went to a nursing home to transport a person in a coma to her nursing home. She was lying there, arms flexed tightly to her chest, a stoma in her neck (so she was breathing through her throat, not her mouth and nose). Her head had a bulge, so it was obvious that she had suffered some serious brain damage, and the look on her face... she looked so young because of that, like a child of six or eight. Her eyes were open and constantly moving back and forth, like she was dreaming with her eyes open, and the only time she moved was when we had to stick a tube down her throat to clear her airway. I was applying suction, and had to put the tube down her throat until she spasmed (the tube started to enter the lungs).

The two guys I was with were pretty jaded, but you could tell they were affected by this call, probably because I was affected. It was just so sad. Nobody really knew her name - there were three different medical charts we encountered, and all of them had a different name. She was 22 years old, and had been in a car accident 3 (!) years ago and had suffered massive brain trauma. She was married too. That's just so strange and tragic. This chick got married young, and it was like... how must her husband feel? Why aren't they divorced so he can move on? Because it was obvious to me that this was one chick that was never coming back. And all she could feel was pain. That was the only sensation she showed any response to.

It was just like, why isn't she dead? Is she really going to have to live the rest of her life like this? At least 40 years of just lying there, sores all over her body and constantly needing suctioning, which hurts her. She's never coming back. She doesn't need life support, so there's no "plug" to pull, but she should be dead. No one should be forced to live like that, constantly in pain and with no way to be anywhere but outside your own head. That's enough to drive a person insane, and if you're trapped in your own head and insane, I'd be willing to bet that you'd enjoy death a great deal more than life. It was just so sickening. It was like, this woman should be dead. It is horrible that we haven't killed her, because what she's living is so... awful. I know that I can't see inside her head and tell what she's really like, but it was obvious that she was in pain, if nothing else, and if I were her I'd long for death. It just makes me so angry that we're forcing her to live in this limbo.