Real life on the dialysis floor at Rockingham

It was working on the dialysis floor at Rockingham Memorial Hospital that I met Joe (not his real name).

My "extracurricular" has always been my job. The past year, my job has been as a Clinical Assistant (CA) on the dialysis floor at the hospital. For the past six months, it's been the night shift.

Joe was an elderly patient who had the greatest outlook on life and the most cheerful spirit. When I went into his room to get his vitals, I'd ask "Hey, bud, how ya doing?" and he'd always reply "Heeellllooooo! Everything's good, and you?" We'd make small talk, and he would usually ask me for a hug before I left the room. He was silly, and a pleasure to be around.

When a friend got me this job, I was expecting just that: a job. It pays the bills, you work for eight hours, then you go home. I didn't realize how involved in this job I would get. Being a theater major for my whole EMU career, I told myself I could never work in the medical field. When I was younger, it was because I was too squeamish. I got over that. Two years ago, it was because I would be too philosophical about death. Some things you don't get over.

A CA's job consists of getting the vitals signs of your assigned patients (including heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, respirations and oxygen saturation), answering the call bell system when a patient rings for help, and doing the nurses' dirty work (like changing diapers and giving baths) that they might not always have time to do. And on most days it's much more. Since dialysis is an acute care unit, we have many of the same patients over and over. When you see these people day in and day out for weeks, it's almost impossible not to grow fond of them. Many of these people seem perfectly healthy, but they may be teetering on the edge of life and death.

Since working at the hospital, I (along with many of the nurses I work with) have developed the morbid habit of checking the obituaries daily. On average, there are five people I know in the obituaries weekly. Some mornings it's difficult, especially on days when I recognize three or four names, but until recently I had never been in the room when someone died.

One night around 1 a.m., I went to check Joe's vitals. "Hey, bud, how ya doing?"

He looked at me very solemnly, his eyes had a funny tint to them. "I don't know," he said.

"What's wrong?" I asked, worried because that's not how my buddy usually responded.

"I don't know," he said. "Something's just not right."

I asked the other people working the floor that night if anything had happened to him, like a stroke. Apparently nothing had, so I just checked on him every hour, until 6 a.m. when my friend Natalie (not her real name) came in to begin her shift. She had walked around the hall, checking on patients when she came up to me and said, "Was Joe's breathing like this all night?" She made an over dramatized hiccupping motion as she inhaled.

"No," I replied. We entered his room to find his breathing extremely labored and him unresponsive. We ran to tell the nurse, who called the doctor to get an order. Everyone was frantic. Joe was DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), so everything had to be done while he was still alive.

A call bell rang. While everyone else hurried into Joe's room, I ran to answer it. I completed the request quickly and ran back to Joe's room to see the nurse throw her arms down in frustration and storm out of the room. Natalie turned to me. "He's gone," she whispered. I just stood there and looked at him, his mouth gaping open, a dead stare looking straight ahead. The light in his eyes had gone out.

College is a great idea. It educates and prepares you for some things, but it won't prepare you for everything. Many of the important things are those no one can tell you. You will only learn the important things if you face the world head on, with no inhibitions at all.