this guy!! the one with the worst abdominal infection i've ever seen who went back to the OR emergently three nights in a row. the guy that they told me would die like every time i worked, but who never did. the guy who drank contrast for a CT and i watched it pour out of the wound on his back.
he was mine for three full months. i nurtured him, cried for him, fought for him. i melted hard candy in his ice chips so his mouth swab would have flavors. we had elaborate rituals where i would spoil him and make the other nurses hate me for it. our goodbye photo from his day of discharge is apparently still on his refrigerator at home.
he was SO SICK, maybe the sickest patient that i've ever had who's still alive. his belly was a tangle of enterotomies, his GI tract went nowhere. he required a full 6 months of TPN with no food by mouth at all, and miraculously didn't get a fatal line infection. he was a miracle.
and now he's back, fat and happy and pretty close to normal. he's got gallstone pancreatitis, but compared to what he's been through, this is nothing. NOTHING.
he is proof that what we do everyday matters. that throwing ourselves into our work and giving our patients everything that we have (and sometimes more than we have) can change lives. can SAVE lives.
this is why i wanted to be a nurse. this is what i naively thought that i would get to do every day. but i'm realizing that even if i only make this kind of an impact on someone's life every so often, it's worth it. and successes like this one can carry me through the rest of the days when i feel like i'm not making much of a difference at all.
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