Good Lives

Started the day off with a syncope -- the same old lady who passed out last Wednesday night, passed out again today. This time she was going to the hospital.

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Took in a frequent flyer from a nursing home. Same thing as happened yesterday. The nursing home calls the commercial service for a transfer for a man with absent bowel sounds. It gets kicked back to us as unresponsive. Well, the man is unresponsive because since he had a stroke, he has been permanently unresponsive. The cops were annoyed again to go lights and sirens and find no one in the room with the patient. The nurse wanted to know why the police were even there. The man is a full code, which means when he dies, we will have to do CPR on him, even though he is basically a vegatable. He is a ward of the state and according to the nurse the state doesn't like to make anyone a DNR.

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We had a sixty year old woman with back pain who had trouble getting out of bed. I thought about calling to get permission to give her some morphine, but held off. She was in pain, but not that severe. She ended up in the waiting room in a wheelchair.

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A young woman ten weeks pregnant with a history of miscarriages, who started bleeding at the same time she was having a sharp pressing abdominal pain. She cried on the way in. She was leaking bright blood. We talked about her other miscarriages. She did have one child -- a miracle baby born at 23 weeks -- now a healthy four year old today.

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A sixty year old woman with a history of angioedema felt her throat swelling, gave herself an epi injection and called 911. She was still having some trouble swallowing when we got there, but soon was better. She wouldn't leave until someone brought the dogs in -- they were old she said, and couldn't be left out. I offered to do it, even though I hate dogs. I opened up the back door, and said, here, pouchies, then I heard some chains rattling and the rustle of two big dogs approaching and then I saw they were German Shepards and I have had some terrible experiences with German Shepards in my life -- one taking a bite out of my butt when I was riding my bike as a five year old, and then another dog -- Stormy -- terrorizing me in the neighborhood when I was in junior high. But these dogs were nice, and gave me no trouble and came right in and approached their owner who gave them hugs and told them to be good, while she put some water in their dishes.

On the way in to the hospital, the woman told me she had just been diagnosed with cancer and was scheduled for surgery in January. She said she was going to have to put the dogs down. She said they were old and incontinent and there would be no one to take care of them when she was sick. I asked if she had family. She paused a moment and then said, it was just her. I said that was too bad. She said they had lived good lives. I said, I guessed maybe being put down wasn't the worst way to go. I said in this job, you came to feel good for people who died in their sleep. Then she said it was a pretty good way to go, to die in the arms of someone who loved you.

And then there was silence between us.

She cried quietly.