Whose number is next?

I woke up this morning thinking about something I read in Renee's blog (Hi Renee, welcome aboard, thanks for your kind words!). She mentioned that one of the times she went to the hospital she was given a number, so she knew she was number so and so while waiting for her turn to be examined.

It reminded me when I was doing my first training at the Medical Center in Athens. I was a young physical therapist and it was my first time in the ICU. We worked in teams of 4, the Chief physical therapist that trained us, his assistant, and 2 of us, still in training.

Right after we would put our white robes on and would report for duty, we' be given a clip board and a pager. There on the board would be a list of the patients that we'd had to visit, their room number, their diagnosis, and the kind of t treatment their doctor wanted us to perform. Each patient was given a number of course, so we knew where to look, in case we had to search in their medical forms etc.

It was a great way to gain experience! We got to work on all kinds of cases. But one thing that caught my attention was that every now and then our beeper would beep and it would show up a patient's number. We were given instructions that every time a number shows up the treatment for that particular person had been cancelled and we should cross out the name of the patient from our list. We didn't give it a second thought and did just as they had told us.

We went ahead with the busy schedule of the day, going from one patient to another, dealing with all kinds of different people and their ailments. By the end of our shift we looked down on our list and the only names left were the ones that had popped up on our pagers and were now crossed out.

My friend commented "Well, it's a good thing we had so many people released today, 'cause I'm beat!" The assistant that was standing right to next her looked at her astonished and said, "You do realize that those were all patients we lost, right?" My friend, still unaware to what the assistant was referring to said "Yes, but it means they got better and they won't need the therapy, so it's good news, isn't it?" She looked at both of us in a condescending way, took a deep breath and said slowly as if that would help us understand better "It means they died... " she said dryly.

My friend and I looked at each other with horror in our eyes. We hadn't realized that getting those message on our pagers all day long didn't always mean that the patients got better, or that they were moved to a different department. It simply meant that they didn't make it. We heard our Chief Physical Therapist say" Well, the good thing is that they sure won't need any physical therapy where they're going!"

I'll never forget how naive and innocent I felt and how quickly that experience grounded us both me and my friend. From then on, and after getting to meet a lot of our patients that were on our daily list, we dreaded hearing the buzz of the stupid pager. We would go down the list hoping it wasn't anyone of our patients or that it was someone that had gotten better and was discharged.

I only spent 3-4 weeks in the ICU as part of my training, but I felt they were the longest weeks in my entire life. That agony of who lived or died will always haunt me.