yfritz's Journal, 22 August 2024

Shift average 15,000 steps = 6.5 miles
16 hr fasting - dinner at 5:30pm, report for work at 7pm, return home at 8:30am, light meal at 9am (I don’t eat while on duty)

The thing about dying people, is that we are not well equipped to provide adequate care to those who opt out of hospice even when suffering reaches a torturous level. The body goes through all sorts of degradation. Caring for them is considered grunt work to put it bluntly and it is difficult to get meaningful support. Did you know injectable promethazine has been removed from hospitals? How am I supposed to help those whose vomiting is out of control and not responding to other antiemetics and alternative measures? “Give oral promethazine, or, you can use a suppository.” Scratch that. They can’t keep anything down so the oral meds are out. Suppositories are contraindicated for patients whose white blood cells are non existent. Between the violent heaves they would beg me, “help me.” I see another heave is rising and their eyes almost pop out before the magma erupts. My job to clean up even though they resist. They resist cleaning vehemently, because it is painful to move. Objection overruled, I can’t let them marinate in the cocktail of vomit and fluid that escapes from the random parts of the body. I proceed. They are mad at me now. “Gently!” “Hurry up!” “Don’t touch my arm!” At last I get them squeaky clean and shining like a new penny, and I timidly hope they get some sleep, but no, sleep has become unattainable luxury to those poor souls. “I’m hot!” I magically procure a table fan for them. “I’m cold!” I fetch a heated blanket. “Too heavy!” Suffering makes people very curt. It’s not personal, I get that, but being the receiving end of such curtness 12 hours straight is taxing, especially when it is evident that nothing I do is helping. All I do is running around like a moron. It was 15,075 steps the other night, to be precise. “Help me, help me.” I want to! I run the gauntlet of their demands. Although it could be grating at times, I appreciate their brusqueness. No mind games there. No room for artificial niceties. No time wasted for asinine prayers. We go on like this until I exhaust all the options to alleviate their agony. Meds are simply not working and the table fan is scoffing at me. Why am I talking about it? Because I started sharing this story to a friend the other day but I didn’t get to tell what I wanted to tell. I rarely get to, by the way. I tuck away those nights of despair in the step tracker app and forget. But this time I want to remember. I want to remember that out of sheer hopelessness I stroked the hair of the suffering lady and it made her chuckle! I didn’t know that people retained the ability to chuckle even after the body gave up humor. And I want to remember that when my shift ended she somehow mustered up the energy to utter a full sentence in spite of her previous commitment to monosyllabic communication. I heard her say “I don’t want you to go.” Those words, when coming from dying people, strike me differently, the sound of earnestness is something I want to remember, something I will hold onto as I drown daily in the sea of insipid exchanges and disposable friendships. And more than anything, I don’t want to forget, she said those tenderest words curtly, ever so curtly.