Planet ICU

This month, I've felt like I've been living on another planet.

I've had five days off total this month.  Five short days.  Most days I've worked 12 hours.  Aaron has had long hours too this month on his pediatrics rotation, so my mom has been watching Julia for 11-12 hours most days this month.  I'm pretty sure God has a special place in heaven for my parents, because the amount of sacrifice my mom and dad make for us is incredible.  Saints, I tell you.  What love.

So, basically, it's been a pretty exhausting month for everyone all around.

And, in the twelve hours I'm at work, life is so different.

I rarely see the sun, because in the ICU, there are hardly any windows.  This planet is a dark one.

We speak a foreign language.  In the past 2 1/2 years, I'd gotten fairly used to Medical-ese, but the ICU has its own dialect with hundreds of new vocabulary words, including dozens and dozens of acronyms.

There is a distinct smell in the ICU.  I can't describe it, but if you're curious, all it'd take is one whiff of my white coat.  Every time I wash it, the smell returns after just one day in the ICU.  There are also many smells much worse than the baseline ICU smell.

Patients do get better and leave, but most of our patients are so sick.  I've seen a lot of death this month.  We see skeletal people, wasting away due to full blown AIDS.  Yellow people, bloated with liver failure, due to years of alcohol abuse.  Barrel chested people, struggling to breathe, after years of smoking.  Feverish, flushed people, fighting infection.  Altered people, struggling against the very people trying to save them.  Moaning people, battling severe pain.  Vacant people, unlikely to ever respond due to significant brain damage.  Blue people, coding and dying. 

I'm familiar with a lot of new procedures and devices.  I've seen how lines are placed in many different vessels, tubes in different orifices.  I know a decent amount about ventilators because many of our patients are intubated.  I'm familiar with dialysis, because many patients are in renal failure.  Familiar with crash carts and ambu bags because we respond to every code blue in the hospital.

I've had difficult conversations with distraught family members.  I've prayed with and held the hands of the dying.  I've rejoiced when patients have been discharged to the general medical floor.   I've been stretched in many ways.

When I leave the ICU, it takes me a little while to adjust to life outside.  Life outside can sometimes seem almost too carefree, too upbeat in the transition, like a bright light suddenly turned on in the dark.  It can take me a little while to decompress, to equilibrate.  It can be hard to even begin to explain to most people what my life has been like lately.

Life outside.  Where the language is different, the breeze is fresh, the stars are in the sky, the people are healthy.  What do people talk about all day on the outside, away from the planet of the ICU?  What can we talk about if we're not talking about illness, vent settings, lab values, chest x-rays, antibiotics?

But life outside goes on.  My husband and daughter have the unique ability to almost immediately draw me back to a much different, but no less true, reality.  And I'm so grateful.  I've been straddling two worlds and I have a purpose in both.  The juxtapositions of life and death this month have made for some interesting food for thought and fodder for prayer.