The focus on preserving life and alleviating suffering, so evident in the hospital, contrasts strikingly with its stubborn disregard when applied to lives ended by Americans lawfully armed as if going into combat. The border between life and death, and the medical teams that receive them have fleeting moments in which to act. In those wards, patients often arrive teetering on On the oncology floor where I work, but nowhere is the medical goal of maintaining life more immediately urgent than in trauma centers and intensive-care units. Our job is to restore people to health and wholeness, or at the very least, to keep them alive. Of course, in hospitals, death and suffering are what nurses and doctors struggle against. Only part of life that is really final, and I learned about the awesomeness of finality during my 12 weeks with those two very dead people. Some days the smell was so overwhelming I wanted to run from the lab. Of bones being sawed and snapped was excruciating the day our teaching assistant broke the ribs of one of them to extract a heart. I expected my focus in the lab to be on acquiring knowledge, and it was, but my feelings about these cadavers intruded also. I also learned something I thought I already knew: death is scary. One man, one woman, bothĭonated their bodies for dissection, and I learned amazing things from them: the sponginess of lung tissue, the surprising lightness of a human heart, the fabulous intricacy of veins, arteries, tendons and nerves The first unretouched dead bodies I ever saw were the two cadavers we studied in anatomy lab. In a way that few others do, I became aware early on that nurses deal with death on a daily basis. The morgue, and there’s nothing any of us can do to get those people back. Whether they were dead on arrival or died later on in the hospital, 80 people’s normal day ended on a slab in Work, or to school, or to a movie, or for a walk in their own neighborhood, and never returned. Those 80 Americans left their homes in the morning and went to They cause, because to really understand the human cost of guns in the United States we need to focus on gun-related pain and death.Įvery day 80 Americans die from gunshots and an additional 120 are wounded, according to a 2006 article in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. By that I mean looking at guns in America in terms of the suffering With the hope of presenting the issue of guns in America in a novel way, I’m going to look at it from an unusual vantage point: the eyes of a nurse. By the time this column appears, there may well be a new locale to add to the list. We all know these place names and what happened there. Wisconsin, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine. Trauma center second opinion final boss series#Bedside is a series about health care from a nurse’s-eye view.
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