THE NIGHT I'LL NEVER FORGET

In the early 1980’s, I spent many nights working in the intensive care units of hospitals in Orange County. My children were small and I’d found a way to work and still be home with them during the day when they needed me. My husband would come home and care for them in the evening on the nights I worked. My shifts were twelve hours long, from seven in the evening to seven in the morning, and I was able to make the same amount of money two days a week that I made in a forty hour work week at my prior job. I worked for a nursing registry that sent me to different hospitals each night, and this particular night I was working in Garden Grove.


Each hospital had their own distinct way of handling the registry nurses. Some of the charge nurses would assign the registry nurse the easier patients to care for and give the more complex patients to their own staff. Other charge nurses would give the registry nurses the most difficult assignments and let the regular staff take it easy.

The charge nurse in the Garden Grove Hospital assigned the most critically ill patient to herself, which was a tremendous relief to me. The patient was a twelve year old boy who had been hit by a car earlier that day and suffered a horrendous head injury. His head was swathed in a huge white turban of gauze and his eyelids were bruised purple and swollen shut. Drainage tubes emerged from the gauze and were connected to a glass bottle which was filling with pinkish liquid indicating it was cerebral spinal fluid mixed with blood.

A tube was inserted through his mouth and into his lungs, and connected to a respirator that did all the breathing for him. Intravenous lines ran into both his arms and a foley catheter kept his bladder empty as the clear yellow urine slowly drained into a bag hanging on the side of the bed.

The boy didn’t move a muscle, and the charge nurse rarely left his side. The ICU was a tiny one with only four beds, so we were all in close proximity to the critical situation and were there to help when the need arose. She would call one of us over to stand guard when she absolutely had to take a bathroom break, but the rest of the time she was the one right there with him.

His parents and older sister wandered in and out all night long. They’d stand by his side and stroke his hand, speaking softly to him, crying and hugging one another.

Around three in the morning, the boy’s heart monitor and blood pressure readings changed significantly, letting us know that he was dying. We rushed to the waiting room and called for his family to come in. They stood at the bedside as he died, weeping uncontrollably. His sister cried out, “Do something! He can’t die. He’s the only brother I’ve got.”

Oh, how I wish we could have done something. All we could do was watch and weep ourselves. It was out of our hands. I can’t think about that little boy or his family without tears coming to my eyes still.

I walked out of the hospital at the end of my shift and thought I would never set foot in one again. Be still, my soul.