I See Dead People
Most people who decide to go into nursing don't really know what they're getting into until it's too late (me included). A perfect example being from my previous post, in that part of my job includes cleaning up incontinent patients. Being an ICU nurse, it just kind of comes with the territory I guess.
Another part of working in the ICU that a lot of people might not always think about, is that because our patients are so sick, even when we do everything we possibly can to save someone, sometimes they just don't make it. Between the ICU and the ER, those are probably the two areas of the hospital where patients end up dying the most often, just because that is where the sickest patients are.
Every ICU nurse remembers their first patient death. Although my first patient death was probably five years ago, I still remember it as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. Unfortunately, death is part of life, and it is something that all ICU nurses have to learn to deal with when it comes up as often as it does in our job.
So last week one of the patients on our unit ended up passing away around 9pm that evening. It was a particularly unfortunate case, as she was a 19 year old female with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia that had gone into blast crisis. She had apparently not been feeling well for awhile, and had been putting off going to see the doctor, probably because she wanted to be with her 1 year old child a few days longer. Because she wasn't my patient, I'm not sure of all of the details of her arrival to the hospital, but I think she may have collapsed at home, and finally been brought in by ambulance. By that point in time, her disease process was so advanced, there wasn't much we could do for her, except give her pain medicine and sedatives, and keep her alive on the ventilator until all of her family gathered together to say goodbye. Once she was taken off of the ventilator, it wasn't long before her body gave out and her heart stopped beating. After she passed away, we then allowed her family to stay in her room with her for awhile, saying their last few prayers and beginning their grieving process.
Once the family was gone, it was then our job to take care of her body. No matter how many times I have done it in the past, I'm not sure I will ever feel totally comfortable being in the same physical space with a dead body. It's just plain eerie. I always have to make sure that there is either someone else in the room with me, or I leave the door as wide open as possible, so I can at least see or hear someone else. Otherwise, I will start imagining things like seeing an arm twitch out of the corner of my eye, or that the body will just all of sudden wake up and grab me. Yes, I know this is irrational, but I have a really vivid imagination that gets a little carried away when it comes to scary stuff. (And that is why I've stopped seeing horror movies.)
When I walked in the room to help the patient's nurse prepare her body for the morgue, she had been dead for several hours. She was definitely the youngest dead person I have ever seen. I was immediately taken aback by her childlike features and her small, frail body. Her entire body was a dark grayish shade of blue, darker around the lips and nails. It was difficult not to look at her face, studying her little button nose speckled with freckles and her perfectly still purplish-blue lips. I could tell that she had been through numerous chemo treatments in the past, as her hair was growing back out, all spiky and wild looking. I wondered what she was like when she was alive and well: bubbly and fun-loving or more quiet and intense?
During postmortem care, it is our job to take out all of the tubes and IV's that we had once stuck in her to help keep her alive. We also have to stick an identification tag on her toe, called a "toe tag," to make sure that her body can be properly identified by the funeral home when they come to retrieve her. Finally, after we place her in a body bag, she is ready to go to the morgue.
At every other hospital I've worked at, they have a patient transport team, whose job it is to take patients around the hospital, whether they are transferring to another room, going to a diagnostic test, or going to the morgue. At Emory, the transporters don't work at night, so the nurses get to do it. So I was the lucky one that got to help take the body down to the morgue. Oddly enough, in this hospital, the morgue was located right next to the cafeteria. Gives you a whole new meaning to "mystery meat," doesn't it?
So there I was, a week before Halloween, going to the hospital morgue in the middle of the night with a dead body. It actually was nowhere near as scary as I imagined it. It wasn't anything like you might see in the movies, where there are rows upon rows of metal drawers that the bodies lie in and some weird, creepy mad scientist looking dude guarding them. Actually, it was a small, very unassuming looking room. We entered the room through a set of wooden double doors. To my right was a row of five or six small metal doors, just big enough to slide an entire stretcher with the body on it into what basically amounted to a large refrigerator. In front of me was another set of wooden double doors, which I can only assume led into the room where autopsies were performed. I made sure to stay as far away as possible from those doors and as close as possible to the first set of doors I came through, just in case I needed to make a hasty exit. And finally, to my left was a couple of filing cabinets and a small desk with a computer on it. I really would hate to be the person that would have to sit at that desk all day.
So once we got to the morgue, we had to wait until a security guard came to open the locked double doors for us. We brought the stretcher in and slid it inside one of the empty compartments. And then we "signed the patient in" by filling out a little form on the clipboard hanging above the metal doors to the compartments. The funeral home would then pick her body up the next day.
And that was all there was to it. I went to the morgue and came back to tell the tale with not even one dead person jumping out and grabbing me. I survived, but hopefully this won't become a regular task at work. I'm about 99% sure that no matter how many times I end up at the morgue out of necessity, it will never be a place that I will look forward to visiting.
Another part of working in the ICU that a lot of people might not always think about, is that because our patients are so sick, even when we do everything we possibly can to save someone, sometimes they just don't make it. Between the ICU and the ER, those are probably the two areas of the hospital where patients end up dying the most often, just because that is where the sickest patients are.
Every ICU nurse remembers their first patient death. Although my first patient death was probably five years ago, I still remember it as vividly as if it had happened yesterday. Unfortunately, death is part of life, and it is something that all ICU nurses have to learn to deal with when it comes up as often as it does in our job.
So last week one of the patients on our unit ended up passing away around 9pm that evening. It was a particularly unfortunate case, as she was a 19 year old female with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia that had gone into blast crisis. She had apparently not been feeling well for awhile, and had been putting off going to see the doctor, probably because she wanted to be with her 1 year old child a few days longer. Because she wasn't my patient, I'm not sure of all of the details of her arrival to the hospital, but I think she may have collapsed at home, and finally been brought in by ambulance. By that point in time, her disease process was so advanced, there wasn't much we could do for her, except give her pain medicine and sedatives, and keep her alive on the ventilator until all of her family gathered together to say goodbye. Once she was taken off of the ventilator, it wasn't long before her body gave out and her heart stopped beating. After she passed away, we then allowed her family to stay in her room with her for awhile, saying their last few prayers and beginning their grieving process.
Once the family was gone, it was then our job to take care of her body. No matter how many times I have done it in the past, I'm not sure I will ever feel totally comfortable being in the same physical space with a dead body. It's just plain eerie. I always have to make sure that there is either someone else in the room with me, or I leave the door as wide open as possible, so I can at least see or hear someone else. Otherwise, I will start imagining things like seeing an arm twitch out of the corner of my eye, or that the body will just all of sudden wake up and grab me. Yes, I know this is irrational, but I have a really vivid imagination that gets a little carried away when it comes to scary stuff. (And that is why I've stopped seeing horror movies.)
When I walked in the room to help the patient's nurse prepare her body for the morgue, she had been dead for several hours. She was definitely the youngest dead person I have ever seen. I was immediately taken aback by her childlike features and her small, frail body. Her entire body was a dark grayish shade of blue, darker around the lips and nails. It was difficult not to look at her face, studying her little button nose speckled with freckles and her perfectly still purplish-blue lips. I could tell that she had been through numerous chemo treatments in the past, as her hair was growing back out, all spiky and wild looking. I wondered what she was like when she was alive and well: bubbly and fun-loving or more quiet and intense?
During postmortem care, it is our job to take out all of the tubes and IV's that we had once stuck in her to help keep her alive. We also have to stick an identification tag on her toe, called a "toe tag," to make sure that her body can be properly identified by the funeral home when they come to retrieve her. Finally, after we place her in a body bag, she is ready to go to the morgue.
At every other hospital I've worked at, they have a patient transport team, whose job it is to take patients around the hospital, whether they are transferring to another room, going to a diagnostic test, or going to the morgue. At Emory, the transporters don't work at night, so the nurses get to do it. So I was the lucky one that got to help take the body down to the morgue. Oddly enough, in this hospital, the morgue was located right next to the cafeteria. Gives you a whole new meaning to "mystery meat," doesn't it?
So there I was, a week before Halloween, going to the hospital morgue in the middle of the night with a dead body. It actually was nowhere near as scary as I imagined it. It wasn't anything like you might see in the movies, where there are rows upon rows of metal drawers that the bodies lie in and some weird, creepy mad scientist looking dude guarding them. Actually, it was a small, very unassuming looking room. We entered the room through a set of wooden double doors. To my right was a row of five or six small metal doors, just big enough to slide an entire stretcher with the body on it into what basically amounted to a large refrigerator. In front of me was another set of wooden double doors, which I can only assume led into the room where autopsies were performed. I made sure to stay as far away as possible from those doors and as close as possible to the first set of doors I came through, just in case I needed to make a hasty exit. And finally, to my left was a couple of filing cabinets and a small desk with a computer on it. I really would hate to be the person that would have to sit at that desk all day.
So once we got to the morgue, we had to wait until a security guard came to open the locked double doors for us. We brought the stretcher in and slid it inside one of the empty compartments. And then we "signed the patient in" by filling out a little form on the clipboard hanging above the metal doors to the compartments. The funeral home would then pick her body up the next day.
And that was all there was to it. I went to the morgue and came back to tell the tale with not even one dead person jumping out and grabbing me. I survived, but hopefully this won't become a regular task at work. I'm about 99% sure that no matter how many times I end up at the morgue out of necessity, it will never be a place that I will look forward to visiting.
posted by Bean at
2:40 PM
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