As I settle into the ICU, I am amazed how much you can learn in twelve days. It is incredible what medicine and technology can do, and yet, what I am learning has less to do with medicine and technology and more to do with personal experience. I see people who are easily in the midst of the worst time of their life.
Obviously, the patient's experience is difficult, but it is surprising how different and unexpected their reactions can be. There are people who have gone 50 years without seeing a doctor who are suddenly dependent on us for their every breath. Some cling to the support with every ounce of strength they have left in an effort to fight the terrible illness that got them there. Others choose a different, yet equally difficult, path and leave our unit peacefully to a quieter room, their home, or their eternity. It truly has been my privilege to be allowed into these personal decisions and private moments. An honor.
What has also been fascinating is the experience of the people who aren't laying in the bed but who are going through an equal amount of pain. Family and friends diligently sit at the bedside. At 2:00AM, the waiting rooms are filled with plastic hospital pillows and cheap white blankets that cover exhausted spouses, parents, children, and friends. When I get the page that someone has taken a turn, it is not unusual to be beaten to the room by their loved ones. The bags under their eyes are darker than mine. Just like the patients themselves, the families reactions are as varied as the colors of the rainbow. Most, to my surprise, are calm, collected, and reasonable. I think my natural reaction would be hysteria and panic, but that is the minority. How do you watch your mom go through painful treatments? How do you come to terms that life will never be the life you and your husband had planned? How do you allow your son decide he wants to go home and rest while the cancer takes over? How do you respect your grandma's wishes when it means the end? How?
I don't have the answer to that question, but I've see it done. There is so much to learn about human experience, and so much more than cannot be understood. And that is endlessly more interesting than the wealth of information I've been learning about ventilators and shock.
I know your question was a rhetorical one, but having been the one of the family members you are talking about I am compelled to answer.
ReplyDeleteIf not for others, for myself.
I think the calm becomes a sort of relinquishment of control that we suddenly realize we were trying to grasp. A control over our lives and the lives of the people we love that we must finally admit never existed at all.
A quieting of the things we thought mattered but really don't in the face of death.
The inability to find any words to pray to God that might possibly describe the feeling except, "Please help me through this".