The good death.

Its hard to describe how I feel right now. I want to try, forgive me if this gets a little discombobulated.

We extubated the old gomer. Dr. Kill feels that we “got so far down wiggie lane that we don’t know our arse from a hole in the ground”. Which I promise sounds much funnier when its said with an Irish accent. But I still don’t know what that actually means. I know that we were in a bad way, “we” had intubated a guy who did not want to be. Now what do we do with him? Well, we took the tube out.

I have seen people die in a wide range of ways. I have seen people that have burned to death, been shot, been stabbed, been in a car wreck, air plane crash, perhaps others that I cant think of right now, but those are the ones that stick in my head. Actually only a few are stuck in my head, the others are fuzzy memories. None of them ever bothered me. I remember thinking that it was odd to not be bothered by my first one; by the sight of a burned and mangled body that was a person at one time. I remember his face and eyes when he actually died. But it seemed good in some messed up way. He was horribly hurt, he should have died. It was “right” that he died. Even though he died a violent death, it seemed like the right thing.

The gomer’s death is not right. There is nothing right about it. It was violent and un-natural. I watched him dieing. I left the hospital and went home. I went for a run and was pondering on the run about what this was, about what I was feeling. The thing that makes me stop and just never want go back is that what I really wanted to do was to go back and take a big dose of morphine or epi and just put the guy out. I wanted to kill him. I wanted for him to die, to just slip into a nice peaceful sleep and not wake up. A movie death. Anything except what was really happening to him.

Part of me is really in turmoil over this. What do my desires say about me as a person? I feel HUGLY guilty over my thoughts, yet they are what they are. It was a huge and primal thought process.

No, I am not cracking up in a bad way but this experience has changed me. I don’t like the ICU. I feel somewhat like the garbage man of a hospital. Send me your trash and I will make sure that they leave in a nice neat bag.

Humm, no, I am not bitter at all.