- Although Theresa Brown talked about various deaths throughout the text, the one that left a lasting impression with me was the first. In my opinion there is no death like the first. As a new nurse, experiencing your first death will stick with you for the rest of your career. She describes the first death as a nurse’s rite of passage, almost as if you are not truly a professional nurse until you lose your first patient. The hardest part about this death I think is the fact that it was unexpected. In a hospital, you would think that all deaths come expected and planned, but that was not the case for this patient. Mary (the patient) had no treatment options left and her lungs were ultimately failing to keep her breathing. No matter how experienced you are as a nurse I do not believe watching a patient struggle for oxygen will ever get easier. When the time for her death finally came, Theresa describes the room as “a holy place, a haven without earthly concerns…the hard work of dying and grieving began in earnest” (pg. 34). I imagine that watching a patient die is not easy feat. It is part of the job, but watching a patient die right in front of you is not an experience I ever expect to get easier for anyone.
- In chapter nine, Theresa made the difficult but necessary decision to move units from one side of the oncology floor to the other. Her frustration with the way the clinicians treated their fellow nursing staff as well as interns and other coworkers had been building up for a while and she knew she needed to get out of the unit. After getting the desired job on the new unit, she did something that I questioned. One of the clinicians purposely asked her to do a task, knowing that Theresa was busy doing something else. Theresa, out of spite, said no that she was doing something else and was happy when she saw that she embarrassed the clinician in front of various other employees. If I were Theresa, I would have helped the clinician to show that I am the bigger person. There was no reason in my opinion to try to embarrass her, knowing that other people could see and hear their conversation. If anything, I would have told her to just let me finish up the paperwork I was doing, and I would be right in to help her.
- A passage from the book that was particularly meaningful was in chapter six, “Condition A”. Theresa says, “In nursing school I received absolutely no training on how to tell a woman her husband of thirty-plus years has died in a hallway…I received no training on talking about death to anyone”. This was especially impactful because I understand that you cannot teach someone about death. In order to grasp what it is like to tell someone there loved one has died, you must experience it yourself. There is no book a professor can make you read that tells you what to say to a patient’s family when their loved one is dying. Knowing what to say in that type of situation is difficult, but it comes where the career. Over time we will all learn to accept death as part of life, but we cannot do that without experiencing for ourselves.
- Early on in the book Theresa mentions a poem by Frank Bidart, “I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing”. She relates it to a career in nursing and how there are many things you love about it, but there are also many things you hate. I am someone who loves to help others in any way I can, mostly because I hate to see people suffer. I think that is what Theresa is also feeling when she relates this poem to nursing. You love to hear that someone has been cured of cancer and is in remission, but you hate to watch them suffer through chemo and radiation; all the while their hair is falling out. As a nurse, day in and day out people who are suffering come to you looking for help. That is why you signed up for the job, because you want to see them get better, even if it means they must get worst first. You might hate that nagging patient who is constantly demanding your attention even when you have three other patients who need you care, but you are going to be just as happy when that patient gets released and you are the reason that they are doing better. That what nursing is all about; seeing patients at their worst so that you can hopefully send them home at their best.
