Surprised by bodily fluids... be it barf, blood, or other unmentionables every day in the ICU is an experience that leaves me in wonder of the profession I get to call my job; because it is of course much more than simply 'a job.' Through nursing I have been given something precious. I have been given the opportunity to go to work each day and make a profound impact on someone's life in a time when they are more vulnerable than perhaps they have ever been before. Patients in the ICU are sick, like really sick, they are confronting new and cryptic diagnoses that will be with them for the rest of their lives. Things like end stage renal disease and pulmonary fibrosis, words now pinned to them that shudder with foreboding,"Your mother has heart failure" or "The leukemia is spreading." Patients and their family's stand in view of death's door from an angle they have never known so acutely and others simple topple down into it without ever really being able to decider where they had stood to begin. Every day and every patient has taught me something about this life, though their names slip away from me over time, their stories do not. And here I will leave them for you to sit cross legged with for awhile, I owe them this, after all they have given me so much.
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