Everyone has a story that can break your heart

Jaysus. Two posts. Two days. It's a bloody blogging miracle.

I've been working a few extra shifts over the summer and have had a chance to chat with a few patients. Normally I work only weekend evenings and spend more time reading than I do ferrying people around. I figure I made $120 an hour for the time I actually worked on holiday Monday, the great majority of my shift was spent reading and chatting with my workmates. Oh, it was a grand night.

So anyway, because I have done a few day shifts I have been going to the floors and sometimes you have to wait FOREVER for a nurse to stop charting and come transfer a patient. So I chat with the patients, or in some cases the family.

I always wonder what people, especially the elderly, did with their lives. Were they happy? Were they loved? Did they travel the world? Fight in a war? So many of our patients are Canadian by choice, what made them choose to move here? I am fascinated by personal histories.

While I was waiting FOREVER (okay, it was only 10 minutes) for a nurse to come and help me with a patient I started talking with his wife. She asked me my name and I said "Emma". She looked at her husband and smiled and he smiled back. I wondered if perhaps they had a daughter with the same name. But she said "When we were students Maine, Geoffrey and his friends always went into a certain diner and the owner would always be yelling "EMMA! Bring me a pen and paper!" She said that for years after, when he and his friends would yell that phrase out for no reason. Isn't it funny how hearing one word can make a memory come rushing back?

I asked her if they had just gone to school in Maine, or were they from the States. They were American and had decided to move to Canada in the late 60s as they were not happy with the state of civil rights at the time and were worried that their three sons would reach draft age should the Vietnam War go on. She said they had always loved Canada, and chose to come to Alberta as they had family in both Calgary and Edmonton and wanted to be near the mountains because they were avid skiiers and hikers.

I looked down at the husband who was no longer able to walk and I wondered how he felt. How does it feel to spend your life being active and able and now you are unable? It makes me feel I am wasting my life, there just is not enough activity in my days. I would rather grow old saying "I am so glad I did these things" rather that "I regret not doing more." It made me realize I really need to change my lifestyle.

That same day I went to pick up a 29 year old patient. She was blind and her eyes were quite dark and sunken in. She was mentally handicapped, I would think she was maybe at the level of a 5 or 6 year old. She was so excited to be going over to x-ray, where she would be "getting her picture taken." Her mum told me that she had brought her home from a home for handicapped children to die when she was 2 1/2. She said they didn't want to leave her alone in a home with no one. "And here she is, almost 30." she said. I wondered with the way she said that was she sometimes bitter that a child she was told would die was still alive. When you have a handicapped child, hands on parenting doesn't end. Did she ever wish she had never taken that little girl home? I don't know. I would like to think she does not regret a day, but she just seemed so sad when she said that.

I also heard, while I got paid to chat on Monday, that last week there was a Code Blue in Labour and Delivery (and hey, blogger that wrote out my entire post on her blog and "corrected the typos" on the mother who almost suffocated her baby, there were no typos in my post, we spell labour with an ou.) A mum had a section and had a pulmonary embolism. She had just had her fifth child and she was 26. I've heard two different endings to this story, that she was transferred to another hospital with a police escort (which is what I hope happened) and that she ended up dying while still in our hospital. I must remember to ask my mother for the update on that.

There are sad stories from the ICN as well, a baby born up north where the ultrasound missed the fact that he had a dia.phra@gmatic hern.ia, where the organs move into the chest cavity and the lungs don't develop properly leading to a lack of oxygen. Last I heard he was in a vegetative state. There was a newly adopted baby girl who developed meningitis, there was another baby sent home to die.

It puts my so called difficult summer into perspective. Sometimes I need to count my blessings, take a moment and enjoy how lucky I am.