A Thousand Firsts

I recently mentioned to one of my fellow nurses that I loved being a teacher because I could have the same experience for the time a thousand times. Teaching and performing even the most basic of skills never gets old. It's so much easier to remove surgical staples when you get to do it with somebody who's so excited about it you know they'll be talking about it for days to their roommates.
This week it was a little different however. One of my students experienced her first death. The patient was a middle aged Chinese woman. Cancer had caused her body to waste away so that she looked like a skeleton with skin lying in the bed. He husband was so attentive, he had been at her bedside for days.
I had gone in to see this patient a few times and had had a brief discussion about end-of-life care with my student. On Friday morning as I was assisting another student with IV medication, I saw the first one standing outside the room. I quickly finished with the medication and went out to talk with her.
Tears streamed down her face as she told me that her patient had just died. "She hadn't taken a breath for several minutes so I listened to her heart. I could faintly hear something at first but then it just faded away. What do I do for her husband? Is it OK to cry with a family? I'm trying to pull myself together..."
Yes, unfortunately as a nursing instructor you experience death a 1000 times for the first time too. They ask questions like: "Why did this happen? What will they do now? This just doesn't seem fair. It seems odd that in a few minutes I will have to see my other patient in another room and carry on like nothing has happened when I know their whole world has changed."
All my "teacher words," no matter how true or how profound, can't take away the pain and shock of losing your first patient. So there we sat in the break room behind the door. After few minutes of sobbing and a bit of talking, she fixed her makeup and went back into the room just in time to help her husband dress her in a beautiful Chinese robe before the rest of the family came to bid her farewell.