I was stationed in the PICU again this morning, but I spent most of my time down at the Burn Unit. I didn't deal very well with the Burn Unit yesterday, and today was really no better, though I was completely decked out in PPG (personal protective gear) the entire time, which was, initially, exciting.
Then I walked into a patient's room.
I didn't know whether I wanted to puke or cry. Both, probably. There were about seven of us crammed into that tiny little room at one point - two doctors, a few nurses, an RT guy, some residents, and me. I watched the nurses change the dressings on the five-year-old girl with third-degree burns on 80% of her body for about a half hour. I lasted alright when they started off bandaging her legs, but then they got to the hands, and all I wanted to do was scream, shout anything to drown out that little girl's wordless cries of pain. I couldn't take watching her anymore.
And then, of course, they decided to intubate her.
I stayed through all that too.
The whole thing left me rather shaken. Sitting here, though, I can take a step back and think. What did I expect to find when I decided to go work at a hospital? Happiness? Who am I kidding? People only end up in hospitals if things have gone wrong. There's no happiness there. We just all act like there is. If we don't, we'd all go insane. It's seeing the kids that's the worst, though. Little kids, brought to this place by their parents in the hope that they will emerge all better. Little kids, hit by cars, stricken by some rare illness, the poor children of plain ill luck. The sad thing is, we don't send them home all better. Something hidden always remains. Psychological, social, physical. It'll always be there. And we can't ever fix it.
Just pretend we did.
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