Details

There have been a few very striking moments in my life.  Times where a little detail sticks out for some reason and carries so much weight with it.

The first instance was the last time I kissed Dave.  He was working at the Cannon Center and I was going to go to Walmart with Boyd and Hayley.  I went through the mail room and grabbed him to say goodbye.  In the safe room we kissed real quick and as I walked away I knew.  I just knew that it was the last time.

A few years later I went on a road trip with Rochelle, Becca and Blake.  We were driving on I-15 and I saw a semi truck in front of us drift just a tiny bit into the other lane.  Becca switched lanes and started to speed up to pass the semi.  For some reason (let's be real, the Spirit) that small movement struck me and struck me and struck me hard.  I pointed at the truck and yelled out "that truck is freaking me out!" As Becca hit the breaks the semi moved right into the next lane, where we would have been had Becca not breaked quickly.

A kiss.  A swaying truck.  And lastly, a small foot squeeze.

Last Wednesday I was at clinicals.  My assigned patient didn't need a lot of help so I followed a nurse around.  There was one patient struggling to breathe.  She had me listen to his lung sounds because they were abnormal.  We helped turn him to avoid pressure ulcers.  He groaned in pain the whole time although he didn't seem very conscious.  We called a respiratory therapist to help him breathe.  We discovered he had a fever and would need some Tylenol.  But of course he couldn't swallow a pill because of the breathing issues.  So I was to give him a pill rectally.  We returned to the room with the suppository.  His two sons were in the room.  The nurse asked them if they wanted to stay in the room or leave for the administration.  They giggled a bit and said they'd like to leave for it.  As they walked out one of them stopped by the foot of his dad's bed.  He'd been there with him at least all night.  He grabbed his dad's foot and squeezed it.  It struck me.  "What just happened?" I asked myself.  I couldn't shake the feeling that something momentous had just occurred in front of me.  This man loved his dad so much.  He was leaving the room for a minute and knowing that his dad wasn't really mentally conscious, he did what he could and squeezed his foot.  I almost started crying and I didn't know why.  I administered the suppository.  I left the room and bragged to my cohort about what I'd done.  As this guy Pat stood with me outside the door of the patient's room waiting to watch a blood transfusion, I told him about the foot squeeze.  Pat said something about the last goodbye.  Uh, no.  This guy still had a few days.  While giving the blood transfusion my instructor came to the room to tell the nurse that the man I'd administered the suppository to was having a really hard time breathing.  But we were in the middle of setting up this transfusion and they are really time sensitive.  We couldn't leave.  My instructor went to work with him and returned a minute later to inform my nurse that he had passed away.  How could that be?  We were just with him 15 minutes before.  I thought he had days left.  His sons hadn't even returned to the room yet.  This living, breathing man that I'd just helped and touched and watched as he suffered was gone.  And that foot squeeze.  It was the last goodbye.

I don't even know how to express how this felt.  My first patient to die.  This very tender, poignant moment between son and father that was just a squeeze to a foot.  It was the single most heart breaking moment I have ever seen in my life.  I can't stop carrying it.  I don't know how to make it make sense.  It's just here, heavy and palpable.