Like a Normal Person

I hear the code blue alarm before I even realize I’ve hit the button with my slightly trembling, adrenaline-filled fingers. I turn my attention back to my patient, who is crashing. He’s still breathing, but it’s become much too difficult, and blood has started to fill his mouth faster than I can suction it out.

In a matter of seconds, the room is filling with staff. Other nurses have come to help. My best friend, Sarah, is among them.

We make eye contact, and I know she is going back to the exact moment I’m fighting not to return to.

The things that bond us aren’t necessarily being vulnerable, “let’s hash it all out” type friends, but moments like this—moments in the trenches together.

I don’t need to tell Sarah why I get a little pale, my hands get shaky, and my eyes go a bit vacant when I have a patient spitting up blood. She knows because she was there the night a tumor, with zero warning, ate through my patient’s carotid artery. She heard me screaming for help as I held this woman up while all of her blood emptied from every orifice.

She helped me lift the patient back into the bed, set up suction, call the code, and handle the poor, bewildered husband.

She stood across from me as we attempted to suction the insane amount of blood from her mouth. We watched in abject horror as the patient reached into the air with her hands, like she was falling from a cliff, looking for something to grab onto. We both watched the life leave her terrified eyes in the midst of her exsanguination. All this while the episode of “American Idol” I’d been discussing with my sweet, now-lifeless patient still played in the background.

Sarah was there for that code, too, and it had lasted over an hour—we took turns running back and forth to the blood bank to get more trauma blood that we’d pour in just to watch it pour right back out.

After it was finally, officially over, knowing it had been futile from the jump, we just did what we could do. We got funeral home information from a shell-shocked husband. We tried to make him comfortable as he waited for his family to arrive.

It had probably felt like a normal Wednesday for him before this. Sure, they were in the hospital, but only a few hours earlier, an ENT had assured him that the small amount of blood his wife had been coughing up was nothing to worry about.

It was a wild juxtaposition that gave me whiplash and made me pray that something like that would never be my tragedy.

We cleaned crusty blood off of his wife’s dead body. We removed tubes and lines that were hurriedly placed in the midst of the emergency. The wreckage after a code of that magnitude is devastating, and the thought of the rest of her family showing up to such carnage made me nauseous.

We scrubbed the blood off the floor, the side rails, the walls. We bagged the blood-soaked linens and canisters full of what we suctioned from her mouth and nose. We picked up all the trash that accumulates on the floor when you’re unbagging supplies with such haste.

I made my patient look as pristine as a bloodless body could look. I covered her up with her arms out, just in case her husband wanted to hold her hand again. I talked to her as I fixed her pillows. I apologized to her for not realizing what was happening before it was too late.

And none of that was weird to Sarah because I always talk to dead bodies. She knows that about me.

What a bizarre thing to know about someone.

The shift supervisor went and got us clean scrubs from Labor and Delivery. I had hardly noticed I was covered in dried blood until it was pointed out.

I called the organ donation hotline, and Sarah chuckled as I rolled my eyes at the 500 stupid questions I had to answer just to be told what I knew before I even dialed the number—none of my patient’s organs were viable for transplant. We went to the morgue to get the stretcher, and I talked to my patient as we put her on the cart.

Sarah and I giggled at the absurdity of having to rearrange dead bodies to fit my patient in the fridge. This used to be someone else’s job before a person who only deals with money and not humans realized it would be cheaper to just make the nurses do it.

In the moment, it felt like a unique experience. And I guess it was, in the sense that my patient, her name was Iris, was unique—like all people are. But the experience of watching someone die isn’t all that unique.

It is intimate—intensely personal. I think huge moments like that bond you to the people you experience them with like no other. And I’ve lived experiences like that with Sarah dozens upon dozens of times.

We never talk about them. What’s there really to talk about? We just put it away—compartmentalize because it’s the safest thing to do. We look out for each other. Pay attention to triggers. Sarah doesn’t do well with people in DTs. I don’t do well when people start spitting up blood.

But this time, it was different.

His heart kept beating.

The life in his eyes never left, remaining panicked and firmly present on this side of eternity.

He was able to nod as the anesthesiologist told him that he was going to be okay, that he was going to surgery. He was sedated and intubated before his bed was pushed to the waiting elevator.

The bleeding slowed. An airway was secured. The patient was rushed to the OR. The responsibility was taken from me.

And maybe it was never really mine to begin with. Maybe it was always out of my hands.

Sarah gives me a quick, “You good?”

I answer with a tight nod. “Yep.”

And I am good.

This is someone else’s tragedy—not mine.

I didn’t lose any blood.

I’m not in surgery right now.

I have no right to be upset.

So we go through the next six hours like we would any other night. We laugh about a confused patient telling our co-worker his name, Dustin, is stupid. We eat lunch at the nurses’ station, even though we aren’t supposed to.

Then I clock out and go home. I kiss my sleeping babies.

I get in the shower and cry, like a normal person.