Hoping Past Numbness

When you work in a hospital, you get used to the 'buzz'. In the past month I have become quite accustomed to tuning out all manner of irritating noises. Don't get me wrong, I hear them. But, my job is about prioritizing instantaneously. So, when I'm preparing a dose of morphine for a post-surgery patient who is three minutes from sceaming in such a way to wake up all the former patients in the morgue three floors below, IV alarms can wait. There's a wide variety of sirens and audible reminders that I am innundated with nightly from the first second I set foot on the floor.

Basically all these noises are annoying. They're designed that way, since experience has shown that pleasant noises don't get nurses in a room quickly. So, as a nurse you learn to notice but not hear as many noises as possible. The human mind is a wonderous thing, and selective hearing has turned out to be one of God's finest gifts.

Hospitals are designed to be numbing. There are no "loud" colors at our hospital. The walls are an opaque white, as are the sheets on beds, to give the impression of cleanliness. All upholstery and paints are typically subdued colors to hopefully prevent irritation to patients. The brightest colors I see all night are the bright red haz-mat bags, and the hunter orange stickers to draw my attention to when IV tubings need be replaced.

Then there's the bland food. The sleepy tiredness that has infected 90% of the staff. The odd sensation of touching one's own hands and having them feel foreign to the body due to how dry they are.

I deal nightly with patients who move in slow motion. Communication requires extensive effort, not only for the drugs the patients are on, but also for the cultural barriers and generation gaps present in our dialogue.

Each night I am surrounded by sensory experience that leaves me feeling numb. It's part of the job, I know. It's part of life too; numbing pain and so many other unpleasantries. But, there are occasional moments of sobriety.

It doesn't happen often on night shift, but occasionally there's this eerie feeling that subtly shakes me from my numbness. When a baby is born, and they care to, the L&D nurses can call the front desk and they play a lullaby over the loudspeakers. It's quiet. The kind of quiet that is reminiscent of God and the way he so often wakes us from our drunkenness. It's one of those rare moments that is so easy to ignore, but when I allow it, it reminds me of the good of the world. At least for a moment I am reminded that there are people downstairs who will leave the building that I reside in for 13 hours at a time, and there lives will be changed. There newness in the world, and in an infant that can barely open its eyes, there is a future that is wide open, full of possibility. Rare though it may be, it is a big picture moment for myself and anyone else who is haunted by the simple tune that plays for less than a minute before the madness of hospital life begins.

I had thought of this weeks ago, when I was first starting. I had a similar experience the other night. This time it was Mrs. Milton. She has end-stage COPD. That basically means she smoked long enough for her lungs to get rock hard, and now she struggles to breath. I was assessing her at the beginning of the shift. She was different than most patients: she wanted to know the numbers and tried to understand what was going on. The ironic thing was that she fully understood she wasn't going to recover, and that her days were numbered. She just liked having a good ballpark figure on how she was doing and roughly how many more days she could count on. She spoke a lot about her family. She was proud of her grandchildren.

I guess the enlightenment was in seeing the difference in spirit between her and most of the patients I take care of. Most patients see their illnesses as something tragic that has befallen them, and in interacting with them they seem to feel they have been unjustly sentenced to poor health and a stay in this hospital. They start coming up with escape plans . . . no I'm not kidding. In truth there's no where for these patients to go. If there were, the injuries they would sustain getting them there would put them right back where they already were. Yet, occasionally I get one like Mrs. Milton who knows why they're there, and knows there's no hope for their body, and so suddenly they live every day instead of counting down the days until they can live.

It wasn't exactly a Carpe Diem moment. Work was still numb when I left her room. I just realized briefly that what we often claim as life, may not really be life. Life isn't just the glorious day in the future when I walk out of work, fall in love with the woman of my dreams, and reach some final epiphany about God before he roles the credits. I think life is possibly just waking from the numbness we too often rely on enough to realize that in spite of all we've done, God has still given us "grandchildren". I wonder if Abraham and Mrs. Milton will connect on that point.

Abraham Heschel wrote, "The insights of wonder must constantly be kept alive. . . The sense for the 'miracles which are daily with us', the sense for the 'continual marvels', is the source of prayer. There is no worship, no music, no love, if we take for granted the blessings or defeats of living." He later quotes Rabbi Mechilta, "Day by day man is sold [into slavery], and every day he is redeemed".

I think the greatest redemption is one which allows people to face the defeats of living unshaken. People face death daily, and no matter how many rounds we drag the fight out, we lose. Perhaps the difference for any who have learned trust, is that they know a God/Reality that is living and victorious. I think it is a testimony to the greatness of the human spirit when one can live and not be deluded to live as though the freedom which the victorious God imparts to us has been overcome by the fear of failure.