February 3

I tied the toe tag on. I'd never done that before. If you have ever read "the Body Farm" or "Stiffs" it gives you an idea about the life after death of bodies and their uses/purposes for science. Symbolically, to me, tying on the toe tag is it. You're a goner, you've gone, vamoosed, expired, died, left your earthly shell, there is nothing left but body - no soul, no life, no breath. It's a humbling experience. I don't think I'll forget some of the people I have been there with when they have died. Working as an EMT, there are a few. I can understand why some woluldn't want to be a nurse, EMT, MD, whatever. Working that closely with people that you see them born into this world, you see them grow, and then - die. To me, that's whate being a nurse/EMT is about. You help people, you touch them when they are sick, lonely, hurt, dying, and dead. It's not always pleasant, it's possible to carry around their memory - the last gasps, blown pupils, and other foulness that sometimes accompanies the few moments before death. Or, you use it to do better for the next person, the next patient. Each experience is just that, and experience. Not something to carry around with you for life.
Some hospitals are overly religious - Catholic, Adventist, Baptist, or very non-religious. Whether the hospital allows it or not, I say a prayer for most patients, quietly, in thought. When working a  code, I'm praying the whole time! Not always a prayer that would bear repeating to my mother, but an expression of my emotions and thoughts to my heavenly Father.
Being in the health care system is my calling I believe. Helping, touching, allowing healing, these are the things I realize to be necessary to my practice. I have to let go of the emotions that come with it eventually. There are moments of tears and laughter, but those moments have to belong to themselves. I can't carry those tears around with me for the rest of my life. I realize why it saddens me - a life to early severed? a child left without a father? an elderly wife seperated from her lifetime partner? did I screw something up? should I have called earlier? am I using this time to express emotions connected to something else?
Whatever the reason, these emotions are expressed and moved past.
The next patient comes is...