Molly Carroll

There is silence, but only in my mind. In reality, I hear visceral sobs broken by sharp gasps and mumbled words in Urdu I cannot understand carried by an emotion I can only imagine.

The silence leaves me kneeling beside this nameless man, my hand on his back, attempting to provide unspoken comfort I know he will not feel.

This was not supposed to happen. It’s hard to believe this is the same room I was in moments earlier. Surrounded by a crowd of other nurses, physicians, anesthesiologists, respiratory therapists and hospital administrators, I spent the last hour here breathlessly pouring my entire body weight into chest compressions to manually create a heartbeat for the sweet woman I was conversing with not long ago. Now it is only myself, her body and her heartbroken son in this room.

I kneel on the ground next to her collapsed son, watching his world fall apart, knowing there is nothing I can do to put it back together for him. My mind is silent, devoid of words to say. Maybe they exist somewhere, but I am unable to find them.

Once my coworker and close friend, Anna, steps into the room I am pulled back into my body. Elevating our voices over the sound of his sobs, we offer water, a chair or a conversation. When our comforting efforts are drowned to silence once more, his wails momentarily switch from Urdu to English. “I cannot live without my Mom. I am going to die without my Mom”.

He does not need us to speak. No words can alleviate his pain, so we sit in a loud silence until he takes a breath long enough to tell us he needs time alone. The very moment we leave that hospital room, a space that made the rest of the world disappear, reality knocks us off our feet and reminds us of the remaining eighteen patients on our floor requiring our care. My mind remains quiet. I ignore the ache, sweat and exhaustion in my body and dissociate knowing I cannot share in expressing any pain or shock. There is still a job to be done.

Her time of death was pronounced at 1412. With five hours left until the end of our shift, I drift through the remainder of the afternoon forcing myself to support our staff, patients and their family members to the best of my ability as the charge nurse. Approaching patient interactions with grace and positivity immediately following such an event feels as if the devastated, exhausted, angry and sorrowful part of myself is pounding on my body from the inside out begging to be acknowledged, frustrated that a smile is forced upon my face.

At the end of the day, when the chaos of the unit is handed to our night shift, I find myself in the car with my boyfriend as we review the events of his day off with his family; the meals he ate, how cute the dogs were while napping on the couch that I absolutely have to see a photo of later, which football teams are winning, and which are losing. My body responds immediately to “so how was your day” with a lump in my throat, a chill up my spine, knots in my stomach, and a blurry film over my eyes that wets my cheeks with tears. Silence again. This time interjected with my own broken cries for the rest of the ride home.

In the following weeks, residual emotions surrounding that day at work surprise me in unwelcomed moments and secretly influence how I interact with others, causing me to show up as someone other than myself. I don’t recognize her. She is broken, tired, and weighed down by heavy emotions from endless gut wrenching situations she gets paid to handle. She is depleted by the expectation to act as ten people in one. She was once filled with compassion, but that part of her has been hardened by the combination of heartbreaking patient outcomes and verbal, physical, and emotional abuse at the hands of those she serves. I was trained for this. I train and lead others through this. I do my job and do it well, but her presence inside me grows by the day and the last thing I want in this life is to become her.

No one will understand the job of a nurse like other nurses do. The world needs more of us. If not for our patients, for each other.