Another depressing post

I skipped blogging last night when I got home from work. There was this patient on my mind... he had been on our floor since at least August (before I even started working at UWMC). 19 years old, with cystic fibrosis. I'd been his nurse a number of times, but everybody knew this guy since he'd been on the floor so long. A few weeks ago, he was my patient, and I spent several hours one night just sitting with him while he cried about his fear of dying. He was waiting for a lung transplant, and was completely overwhelmed. He just kept asking me when he would get new lungs... and then broke down when he talked about how he didn't want to pray for lungs because then it would mean that somebody else had died. I didn't know what to say, so I just sat next to his bed while he cried. It was an emotionally draining shift. I can still hear him begging me not to leave him, that he didn't want to be alone. He died yesterday in the ICU. Some of the nurses went to pay their respects, but I couldn't bring myself to go. When I told my mom this morning that this patient had died, she began to cry on the phone. And it occurred to me that I didn't. Here I had sat with this boy, holding his hand while he worried about his own death, and I haven't shed a tear. I don't know what to do with the emotions, sometimes. A friend asked me recently how I deal with gross stuff at work, whether I thought about the fact that I was working on a person, or whether I just focus on the task at hand. Maybe the reason that being a nurse is so hard is that you can't always just focus on the task. And that's a good thing. I became a nurse to work with people, but sometimes that is the most difficult part.