Caring is Creepy

My new rotation is keeping me busy. And in the very best of ways. I feel like we are actually accomplishing something good. It's truly a team effort and everyone seems happy, including our teeny patients. Their parents seem happy too, or as happy as one can be in the NICU, and there is an overtone of goodness in the air. We start things, we prevent things and we fix things. The babies get better and go home. Until sometimes they don't.

And then you are left replaying the events over and over again in your head on the drive home. You are caught staring blankly at a green light, or notice yourself shivering in the shower as the cold water pours over your hanging head. You squint and blink in an effort to bring back the pictorial memory of the order you wrote on her chart, just before everything went to hell.

And over and over again you replay the tape in your mind, from different angles and perspectives, in a ravenous search to figure out where you went wrong. Why didn't that work for her? It worked for all the other babies. Why was she different? Why didn't she look sick? Did you listen to her nurse well enough? Did you really hear those breath sounds, or was it the 2am sleep deprivation buzzing in your ears?

All day, everyday, in different circumstances until one day you look up and realize that it has been a week since you absentmindedly traced her name in the margins of your paper.

It's not over until it's over. And you wonder if it will ever be.

Sometimes I wish I could leave my job at work. I wonder what it might feel like to be waiting in line at a drive-through and not be playing those tapes in my head. Or to snuggle up in bed at night and not contemplate the decisions of tomorrow. But I realize that no job is ever really left at the office. We all carry our work home with us, in our pockets or on our sleeves. I defy you to prove me otherwise.

And the only way I can justify this infiltration is in the hope that my still caring, even outside of the hospital, is proof that I am still a human being and not, in fact, a soulless-android. Or by telling myself that the next time will be different. That when I am curled up in bed at night with my eyes shut tight, she whispers in my ear because it would be dangerous to forget her.

But all I really want to do is go back to where I left them crying in the hall and sit down a cry with them. I don't know what happened. She was lovely, and she mattered and it is incredibly sad that she is gone.



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