The Essay

It wasn’t the jolt of panic that shot through my spine, exploding into my chest when they wheeled her through the front door. It wasn’t the crushing fear etched on her parents’ faces as they waited, helpless. It wasn’t any moment during her week in the intensive care unit. It happened more than a year later, as I reached for a cup of coffee in the break room and saw a small newspaper clipping tacked inside a brief, handwritten note. It was then that I first understood the true nature of grace.

Lord knows it wasn’t the first time a heartbreakingly tragic tale had taken root in one of the rooms of the intensive care unit in which I spent most of my college years as a unit secretary, chasing after nurses, trying to be of some use. I thought I wouldn’t survive the first few weeks, as families sobbed next to beds filled with silent loved ones breathing with the help of machines. Even several years later, as I look back at my life in Columbia, Missouri, through my window in California, realizing that I gained enough weight while working in the ICU to equal another human being, I wonder how I managed to get through one day. I still feel a sense of awe remembering the nurses who walked those halls for years. It takes a hell of a lot of heart to handle death and disease as a routine part of the job.

She was 15 years old when a vessel ruptured in her head. There were no warning signs. No one could have predicted it or stopped it from happening. She was on a school field trip when it hit, learning about the brilliant blanket of wildflowers the Ozarks shower across the landscape each spring. One minute she was standing, laughing with her friends. The next she was on the ground, unresponsive.

We didn’t get many kids in the unit. Older patients with strokes and middle-aged folks with back surgeries were far more commonplace. Occasionally a traumatic case would come through, but rarely a child. So when a young person did roll through the front doors, everyone’s chest would tighten and a wave of sadness would flow through the corridor before we put aside our fears and went to work. Treatments for bleeding in the brain are fairly standard. But some of them shocked me, despite the fact that I had been raised by two nurses and our dinner-table conversations had often centered on stuff so grotesque, you would have thought we were discussing a Halloween haunted-house display.

By the time the girl reached us, the swelling in her head was severe. To lessen the pressure and therefore the potential damage to her brain, a portion of her skull was removed. When her parents were asked to leave so that one of the nurses could perform a task, I stood at her door and wondered about the white bandage on her head. How was it possible to survive when a portion of the very thing that is supposed to protect you has been removed?

Throughout the course of a week, everyone did what they could. Countless doctors fluttered in and out of her room. Her family clung to one another, fear turning to grief in their furrowed brows. After a barrage of treatments, it became apparent she would not make it. Staff whispered in hushed tones about how sad it was to see someone so young die like this. I asked one of the nurses why the doctors were continuing with treatments when it was obvious that she was gone. She told me that cynics will tell you physicians are simply worried about being sued, so they administer treatments and tests they know will have no effect to give the impression they have done absolutely everything possible. But most often there are circumstances where the family needs more time to come to terms with what is happening. The added activity and its explanations help them to understand the reality of the situation. When I looked into her mom’s and dad’s faces, their crushed hearts breaking through, I knew they understood.