ICU

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I’ve been doing this course for the last nine weeks, learning how to become a Health Services Assistant, which is basically like a hospital orderly. For the last two weeks I’ve been doing my placement at a big hospital in the city. I’ve basically been working from 7am till 3 everyday, unpaid, on what has got to be the longest job interview in the world. And I don’t care, because the things that I am doing and the things that I am learning are so incredible that I feel like I am going to shit my pants every time I walk through the doors. I get up at 4.30am, willingly, and I call people sir and ma’am and I mean it. It’s weird, I know, but not as weird as some of the things that I have witnessed in the last two weeks. My placement lasts for three weeks but the last week will be spent working in the kitchens and it’s really not as exciting as the rest of it. Anyway, on with the show.

So on my first day I rocked up, did my induction, then they rostered me on as a cleaner and took me to a ward and I began. I have only been in a hospital about five times in my life and never as a patient. The first ward I went to was the burns unit. If you’ve never seen injured people up close this is a good introduction. You want to look, you want to stare so bad it feels like your eyes have taken control of your body. Some are connected to machines and swathed in bandages. Some are up and mobile. All have pink new scar tissue and lots of it. I talked to a few people as I cleaned up around them. I really didn’t know what to say but I soon fell into the old retail patter. The rest of the day is a blur, as is much of the first week. On the first and second day of my second week I worked in the Intensive Care Unit. I cleaned around unconscious people and their grieving families and saw some things that I’d like to forget but are probably very import that I saw them in the first place. I saw a man sitting next to his wives bed, holding her hand in his, lowering his face to it as he wept. I thought they only do that in the movies, I said to myself as I watched. I watched the nurses turn a patient over so that they could clean their soiled bedclothes as and they turned them they continued to defecate. There is a line from a Louis C.K. piece where he asks “Have you ever seen an ass just shit?” and I had always found the image funny and when it happened in front of me I admit I had to turn away and look at the roof for a while. Also, there were a lot of wet farts which did nothing to help my inappropriate and maniacal grinning.

The two days that I spent in ICU were probably two of the most incredible days of my life. They are a bit of a blur as I’m pretty sure the entire time my eyes were like golf balls. It was like a spigot that stimulation shot out of and I could only catch so much before I had to move away in case I drowned. No one died whilst I was there but as I said to a friend, it was like they were in competition to see how close they could get. I watched them turn one guy and whenever they touched him his vitals would spike and we’d have to wait a few minutes before they could move him again. For someone who thinks about death a lot it certainly made me reconsider some of the notions that I previously held, it also confirmed a lot of things that I had thought about myself. I felt my heart break so many time on those two days that I thought that there was no way that I could go on with it, that there was no way in hell that I could do this for a living. And then I had a couple of really amazing positive experiences and I thought to myself, ‘Why would I want to do any thing else?’

Humans are funny creatures. The human body is an amazing machine, the mind a fragile network of synapses. We all process things differently, we can never be sure how we’ll react to a situation until we are presented with it. Quite often the situation will be a surprise and it will shock us somehow, lurch us off the familiar rails into areas previously unknown, previously unconsidered. This is my favourite territory. The outer limits. Quite often it will be a place of unimaginable misery but there is something to be said about pulling yourself out of the fire to emerge pink and clean. You can either kid yourself and pretend that life is beautiful and full of wonder and see everything with child like amazement, which is fine, because life is beautiful and full of wonder and deserves to be amazed at, but there is that other side, that thing where if you look at anyone, anyone at all, you can be certain that they are dying. Not now, maybe not anytime soon, but they are, inextricably marching towards the night. We all are. We can be scared of it and try and pretend that it doesn’t happen but I have found it better to confront it head on, look it right in the eyes and say OK. By agreeing to life we are agreeing to at some stage die and we are also agreeing to all the shitty little things that happen in between. Buy the ticket take the ride kind of deal. It’s a lot to take on and by the time we have realised that these are the terms and conditions it is too late, we are adults or teenagers and suicide is such poor form, so passé in these modern times.

I walked past a room during the week and glanced inside and saw a middle aged woman sitting on the edge of her bed. One leg had been amputated just below the knee and the other leg just above the ankle.  He bandaged stumps hung unevenly and she was just sitting there, staring down at the ground. It was so awful, so heart wrenching, so terrible that it gave me a sense of wonder, like I had seen something that not many people get to see. My own private horror show, a misery en scène, if you were.

In ICU I helped turn a patient who was quite distressed, possibly suffering from advanced dementia, maybe he was just crazy. As we tried to roll him over so the nurses could clean him he struck out at me and started trying to swat me away. I held him gently and let him have at it, talking to him the whole time, trying to ease his distress. His eyes were full of fear and as I talked to him I could feel him start to relax and soon he was calm. We dressed him and then moved on to the next patient that needed our help. It felt good and it felt right.