Awhile back I wrote about this subject on my facebook page, I’m in a writing mood today.
So here goes, I have this strange deal with death. Not a “sell your soul” deal, just an unnerving preoccupation with it and it’s not my doing. It follows me…..
I guess it started when I was just a couple months old, according to my Mom we were visiting her parents. My Grandfather Kiser wanted to hold me, so my mom handed me to him. He was walking across the room when he told my mom to take me back. He took a few steps and dropped to the floor of a heart attack, not many people survived heart attacks then and he didn’t.
Over the years growing up of course we had people in the family pass away and I never thought about it too much. I was sad of course, but it was never that close. I remember one of my buddies next door who spent summers in North Carolina with his grandparents. One year he came back with the story of how he found his grandfather dead at their home there, I don’t know why that stuck with me all these years. We were about 8years old. I would learn later about that scenario in my older years.
I clearly remember losing friends in the early 70’s, kids really teenagers. Jeff was hit by a car crossing 41 to go to work by the airport, Lee was decapitated when he hit a guy wire on his motorcycle,he was 15 or 16. There were others. But the worst death at the time was my Uncle John’s passing. I will never forget the day, the funeral and the overwhelming feeling of grief no 15 year old should have to deal with. It lives with me to this day.
Weeks after high school graduation, I got a job at LW Blake hospital, death can’t find me there( I never thought that, but was thinking it would sound good). I was 17 and to this day I have no idea why I wanted to work in a hospital, maybe it was for the air conditioning? I soon realized it was full of females too. I saw things I never thought I would see and meet so many interesting people.
But then he found me, who would have thought that a patient transporter would along with the live people, may have to transport the dead ones to the morgue. So I did. Remember I had only seen a couple dead people in my life and those were dressed up. Here was a gentleman, cold and sort of purplely gray. I was near the head of the bed as they put him in a plastic bag, then the thump of his lifeless body as it hits the cold aluminum tray. I was 17.
I worked several different job’s in my early days in the hospital, Patient transport, nursing assistant, dark room guy in X-ray, Radiation therapy assistant and finally Respiratory. None of them kept me from death. But back then I never saw it like I see it now.
One day while I was working as a nursing assistant I heard a woman yell for help. I was all of 18 and thought I had a bit of a handle on this hospital stuff. I hurried to her room, she was in obvious pain and said her neck hurt. She asked me to rub her neck. I learned a huge lesson that day. I started to rub her neck when she collapsed in her bed. I yelled to call a code. The room filled up with people as I told them what happened. The nurse with the chart said ” she was admitted with blood clots” My heart dropped, I realized that I most likely had helped that clot go to her brain. Death had found me.
Over those 30 odd years I witnessed more deaths than I could count. I’m talking close up, not by the door, not in the hall, but looking directly in their eyes as their life is over, because as a Respiratory therapist we are always at their head, breathing for them and many times giving them their last breath. People often hear of the “doctor pulling the plug” on a patient who is on a ventilator. Ha, the person who does that is a RT, on doctors orders. Most of the time the doctor isn’t even in the building.
I fought death many times and even won some. I held the heart of a gun shot victim, doing internal cardiac massage as we transported him to the OR, death won that one. I once did mouth to mouth resuscitation on a baby, we won that one.
I was told I had PTSD, most likely from my job, trauma has a way of doing that to a person. I told my doctor my death stories and he looked at me and said” Maybe you shouldn’t have got into that line of work”.
Thanks Doc
