All that lives

"All that lives must die" -Shakespeare in 'Hamlet'

I've had a few different patients this last week or so that are very old and are probably living the last few days or weeks of their life.

I have some thoughts:

1. Everybody dies. Unless Jesus comes back and rescues us all within my lifetime, I'm going to see a lot of people die. The two patients that I've seen this week have lived a long life. When they were told that they didn't have a lot of time left, they both said something like, "I know everybody dies, so I think I'm ok with that." They knew that everybody dies. It's part of living.

2. As a nurse, it's a little bit tricky to watch an old person die. Our goal is normally to promote quality of life, but most of the time we want to 'heal' people. In these cases though, there's no healing to be done. Both of my patients this week have DNR and DNI orders. This means that if the alarms go off because our patient's heart stops beating, we can't do anything to save them. I totally understand this because it could cause them prolonged suffering. However, I can't imagine being the nurse who has to stand there and watch them fade away. I'm sure this will happen to me at some point, but I'm hoping that I can hold out for a while.

3. My heart hurts for the families. They know that their loved one is old. That doesn't make it any easier for the family. I've had the opportunity to support some family members for a while, but it's so hard. There aren't words.

4. I'm a Christian. A lot of my patients probably aren't Christians. I pray for each of them on my own, but I don't know what to do other than that. I honestly don't know what's appropriate. It makes my stomach hurt.

5. I hope I never get 'accustomed' to death.

6. I think that it's appropriate to write a blog post all about death. It's something that we need to struggle with and think about. It's a hard part of life, but it's definitely a part of life. Also, thinking about death makes me want to live more fully while I can. Finally, death can give me joy because I know that death doesn't have to be the end.