(no subject)
I should be finishing flash cards for tomorrows quiz. My mind isn't on hematology though. In fact my mind is worlds away from hematology.
Tonight during clinical I had my first experience with post-mortem care (care you provide to the body of someone after they have passed away.) She wasn't my patient. I never met her. I met her daughter when she was crying loudly into her cell phone. I gave her a hug... which was strikingly not nearly enough comfort.
The room was still. Her bed was still made, all of the pillows beneath her head carefully placed to prop her up to make breathing more difficult. Strategic pillow placing is an art that you perfect as a nurse to make sure your patient is as comfortable as possible. Her legs were elevated on pillows too, most likely to drain the peripheral edema that would have accumulated there. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth hung open like an unended quote. Death doesn't look the way it does in the movies. Two hours into death your face is very pale, the blood in your body starts pooling according to the theory of gravity, your toes point from rigor... almost in anticipation of tagging.
Post-mortem care is this beautiful thing. I have a hard time verbalizing how I feel about it. In some ways, it is more intimate then the care you provide to someone while they're living. You see them in the absence of themselves, a state more exposed then I can really wrap words around. We swabbed the blood that had accumulated in her throat. We washed her body with great delicacy and attention to detail. She was covered in a scented powder. I was very gentle when I removed her catheter. She was given a clean gown before we rolled her into the bag. the shroud. the one you always associate with death. the nurse filled out the tag and handed it to a student. He tied it in a bow, and I caught him making sure it wasn't too tight.
Death has a texture, maybe not a texture but a tactile sensation. Negotiating her arms around towels, I could feel death in her skin. Your skin in death does not feel the way your skin feels in life. It is almost as if through dying your skin loses a structural component of itself immediately enough to notice. Her fingertips were purple, a dark black purple that is unmistakeably the color of death.
We gathered around her, a group of us, two LNAs, her RN, and 6 students. We gathered around the body she left behind and cared for it with a tenderness that suddenly makes every ancient ritual of every culture surrounding death so clearly necessary. So beautiful. We sat in the room with her for twenty minutes before it began. We sat and laughed and joked and the laughter weighed like lead in the room. We laughed. her chest didn't rise to take in breath. We laughed. her family was somewhere holding on to each other, trying to understand the magnitude of their loss. We gathered around her, washed the pain and grime of long-term illness off of her body, freshened it with powder for whatever laid ahead of her, maybe for luck, maybe for no reason at all.. maybe to make ourselves feel better. Washed and perfumed, freshly adorned in a new gown, we zipped her into the bag that would carry her to her funeral parlor where she would probably rest comfortably for the first time in months.
We gathered and bathed her and made sure she would be comfortable for that rest.
We stood to bear witness to that passing.
There is something beautiful about post-mortem care. Something I haven't captured here. Death has a certain elegance that needs to be witnessed to be understood. It reaches you in a very specific way when you find yourself in a position to be treating death in a tender way.
this is how we all go.
this is how it happens.
we leave with our mouths open while our fingers turn purple and our blood settles in patterns that depict where the sheets were wrinkled. The wrinkles you die with are the wrinkles you keep.
this is what happens, as I have seen and understood it to happen.
Tonight during clinical I had my first experience with post-mortem care (care you provide to the body of someone after they have passed away.) She wasn't my patient. I never met her. I met her daughter when she was crying loudly into her cell phone. I gave her a hug... which was strikingly not nearly enough comfort.
The room was still. Her bed was still made, all of the pillows beneath her head carefully placed to prop her up to make breathing more difficult. Strategic pillow placing is an art that you perfect as a nurse to make sure your patient is as comfortable as possible. Her legs were elevated on pillows too, most likely to drain the peripheral edema that would have accumulated there. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth hung open like an unended quote. Death doesn't look the way it does in the movies. Two hours into death your face is very pale, the blood in your body starts pooling according to the theory of gravity, your toes point from rigor... almost in anticipation of tagging.
Post-mortem care is this beautiful thing. I have a hard time verbalizing how I feel about it. In some ways, it is more intimate then the care you provide to someone while they're living. You see them in the absence of themselves, a state more exposed then I can really wrap words around. We swabbed the blood that had accumulated in her throat. We washed her body with great delicacy and attention to detail. She was covered in a scented powder. I was very gentle when I removed her catheter. She was given a clean gown before we rolled her into the bag. the shroud. the one you always associate with death. the nurse filled out the tag and handed it to a student. He tied it in a bow, and I caught him making sure it wasn't too tight.
Death has a texture, maybe not a texture but a tactile sensation. Negotiating her arms around towels, I could feel death in her skin. Your skin in death does not feel the way your skin feels in life. It is almost as if through dying your skin loses a structural component of itself immediately enough to notice. Her fingertips were purple, a dark black purple that is unmistakeably the color of death.
We gathered around her, a group of us, two LNAs, her RN, and 6 students. We gathered around the body she left behind and cared for it with a tenderness that suddenly makes every ancient ritual of every culture surrounding death so clearly necessary. So beautiful. We sat in the room with her for twenty minutes before it began. We sat and laughed and joked and the laughter weighed like lead in the room. We laughed. her chest didn't rise to take in breath. We laughed. her family was somewhere holding on to each other, trying to understand the magnitude of their loss. We gathered around her, washed the pain and grime of long-term illness off of her body, freshened it with powder for whatever laid ahead of her, maybe for luck, maybe for no reason at all.. maybe to make ourselves feel better. Washed and perfumed, freshly adorned in a new gown, we zipped her into the bag that would carry her to her funeral parlor where she would probably rest comfortably for the first time in months.
We gathered and bathed her and made sure she would be comfortable for that rest.
We stood to bear witness to that passing.
There is something beautiful about post-mortem care. Something I haven't captured here. Death has a certain elegance that needs to be witnessed to be understood. It reaches you in a very specific way when you find yourself in a position to be treating death in a tender way.
this is how we all go.
this is how it happens.
we leave with our mouths open while our fingers turn purple and our blood settles in patterns that depict where the sheets were wrinkled. The wrinkles you die with are the wrinkles you keep.
this is what happens, as I have seen and understood it to happen.