just another night shift?

i had a very ... interesting.... night at work the other night. it was super busy, and i was super exhausted. i was sure hoping that "they" were going to be right when they said that by my 2nd trimester i should be feeling better. feeling great, even. well, i'm feeling a bit better, but certainly not great. i can keep the nausea at bay with several snacks, small meals and an afternoon nap. but the physical exhaustion is still there, always trying to tag along with everything i'm doing like an annoying little sibling (okay, i don't know what that's like - i was the annoying little sibling always wanting to tag along).

so i was tired to start out my night shift despite the 2.5 hour nap just beforehand. between the 2 very confused patients who repeatedly crawled out of bed (setting off their bed alarms and sending us running down the halls to their rooms before they hit the floor), and being the only rn on the ward able to be the cardiac nurse and the nurse in charge (adding an extra amount of stress), and that excessively smelly bedpan that almost - almost! - made me vomit (with all the nausea in the past 3 months, i have not vomited once and i did not want to start now!), we had a patient die.

she hadn't been doing all that well lately, but we certainly didn't expect her to go so quickly. another nurse had been in her room and the patient had said something to her. the nurse asked me to come help in her room, but when we returned, she had suddenly become unresponsive. we unsuccessfully tried rousing her, while the patient took a few shallow breaths, with long stretches of apnea in between. my colleague checked her blood sugar level while i checked her vital signs. there were none. i listened with my stethoscope for a heartbeat..... for a long time.... nothing. i got the other nurse to listen too, because i wasn't going to tell the family that she was gone when she wasn't. (the patient had a "do not resuscitate" status, otherwise we would have called a code blue quite sometime before this).

i realized at some point that i had seen her take her last breath. i have watched people who are dying before, including my opa last summer. and i've seen a few deceased people, both in hospital beds and caskets. but i had never watched someone take their last breath and die. that is a different experience. i can't describe it any better than that, because i don't know what to think any more than that at this point.

i was so exhausted, but i knew that as the nurse in charge, i needed to call the family. i sat by the phone for a long time, praying for the right words, trying to figure out what to say. my mind was foggy by this time and i was so afraid that i would say something insensitive like "hi, sorry to wake you up at this hour, but your mom is dead." the other nurse that was with me in the patient's room offered to make the call and, even though i felt like i was chickening out, i gladly let her. the family ended up coming only at shift change in the morning and i never did talk to them (although the other nurse did). but sometime later i regretted that i didn't think to make an effort (it didn't even occur to me at the time) to seek them out and tell them that we were there and that their mom was not alone when she passed away. i'm hoping the other nurse told them.

of course the night carried on, our crazy patients kept jumping out of bed and people kept having to go to the bathroom. and so life goes on.