Peace at Last

So it finally happened. I experienced my first "death of a patient". For a long time we have had a patient who was very sick and came from a hospice situation basically to die. She was a sweet old woman. I cared for her last week when she first came in and I cared for her this morning at 2:24 am when she passed away. We learned about this in our class and we all knew eventually there may come a day when a patient we cared for died....but I wasn't really expecting it to happen to me. I work with mostly joint patients and unless there is a huge unforeseeable event...my patients are usually just fine. But for some reason yesterday when I went to bed after my shift I had a dream that this patient died while I was there and I could visualize caring for her and cleaning her after she died (how morbid is that???). Around midnight or so I was telling the nurses and the other tech about my dream and we were talking about how strange it was. I had decided it was anxiety but 2 hours later it actually happened. Very eerie. After it happened I went in and cleaned her and it was a strange but spiritual experience....preparing a body for a soul who has already passed. I didn't personally know her but I cared about her all the same and when the funeral home came to take her body I found myself tearing up. It was more because I was wondering if that is how my grandma left this world. If the funeral home came and got her. Who was with her? How was she feeling? I miss my Mam more than words could ever explain. I think about her all the time while working at the hospital. Hoping that the way I care for these people is the way someone cared for my Mam when I couldn't be there. Anyway...it's been an eventful week. Seeing how fragile life really is. One minute here...the next gone. I found a quote that I really liked.

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity"
-Gilda Radner

That is how I want to live my life. Making the best of each moment.
What a week.
Birth of a baby who I already love and the death of someone who could have been my own loved one.
For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven.
A time to be born, and a time to die.
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.


I couldn't have said it better myself.