blueberries

There is something particularly demoralizing about heading into work on a Friday evening, when the rest of the city is checking its lipstick and looking over the happy hour menu, laughing blithely over their beers.

I don't really miss that life most days, but I missed the carefree buoyancy of it all that night; wanted desperately to march right in and sit down at the first table of laughing people, to throw my head back with them and laugh like a drain, the most obnoxious girl in the bar. Instead I splashed cold water on my face, found clean scrubs, tempered my espresso with milk. I drove to the grocery store and wandered the bright, clean aisles, looking for something to ease the way through the long, dark hours. Blueberries were on sale so I grabbed a quart and a pack of chewing gum - bright, sweet antidotes for the handful of bitter pills ahead.

It is a long, shivery walk from the parking lot to the Emergency Room and I fell in step with the silent, single file line of nurses, travel mugs in hands. This winter seems colder than last - or maybe I've made an unknowing bargain in my quest for survival: the thinning of my physical skin as my emotional skin has thickened to a rough, tough hide. As the wordless line snaked deeper into the bowels of the hospital, I thought of all the similarities between my job and a miner. The changing of shifts, time clocks, union dues. We may not have the physical heft of bedrock, boulder, and crag upon us but, believe me, the weight of humanity is a physical pressure only waiting for the invention of an instrument sturdy, subtle, sophisticated enough to measure it.

I will spare you all the details between when I clocked in 7:00 pm and sometime around 2:00 am when I found myself squatting on the ground, reaching under the sterile drape to hold my patient's head steady, while the short, no-nonsense woman from the neuro team drilled through his skull with a hand drill. Right before we'd started, the man's girlfriend had rushed into the bay and thrown her weeping self across his chest. Please baby! Can you hear me! You've got to fight, baby! FIGHT for ME! I bit my tongue to keep from telling her that of course he couldn't hear her, my whole job was to make sure that the propofol was dripping steadily enough into his veins to keep him from hearing her, from fighting the ventilator, from doing anything but lying there, motionless. I regretted these thoughts as soon as I thought them. What do I know anyway about what he could or couldn't hear? There wasn't time to dwell on it, though; the bossy woman was waving the drill around and the cycling blood pressure was going up instead of down. It's now or never, she said. So I said, ok, I'm ready. This is your life now, I thought as I squatted there, my whole body aching with the strain of holding that single head still. But as I watched the blood and spinal fluid pour from above like a waterfall, congealing in a rubbery pool by my foot, I saw very clearly that it was also that man's life now, too.

By 3:30 am I'd transferred my patient to the ICU, giving his new nurse the handful of information that I had. I pushed the empty ER stretched through the quiet halls and parked it in the long line of beds waiting to be cleaned and made for tomorrow's patients. I went into the locker room and splashed water on my face, washed my hands until they were red and raw, grabbed my bag, and went and stood in ambulance bay for a few minutes. The air was cold and clear. I took a few deep breaths. Then I began popping blueberries into my mouth as fast as I could, marveling at the way their thin, taut skin holds everything inside.