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On Religion, Nursing, and Sympathy for the DevilSome of the mail I've received on Sympathy for the Devil has asked about my religion or encouraged me to explore someone else's. I don't discuss my beliefs, because I feel anyone's relationship with God is personal and private, but I thought I would tell you a little about the story behind Sympathy for the Devil. I was an RN for ten years-twelve if you count the two years as a nursing student, which I often do. Most of that time I worked in the ER, which I loved, but I was a nursing supervisor for a year and I staffed a med-surg floor before I quit, and for a while I worked in a couple of ICUs. When I worked ICU, I saw the things that Dayne saw. I did the things she did. I kept alive people who wanted to die because their families wanted them to live and refused to honor their wishes or their living wills. I felt brittle old ribs crack under the heel of my left hand when I did CPR on people who were beyond hope; I suctioned and cleaned and turned; did range-of-motion exercises on comatose people to prevent contractures; read heart monitors and studied EKG's; fought with IV lines and Swan-Gantz lines and titrated cardiac drips and all the other thousand things medical technology makes possible but not always right. Sometimes what I did helped. Sometimes people got better. Almost as many times, I think, they didn't. People who go into ICUs today are a lot sicker than they used to be, and while nurses can do plenty of things to keep them alive, many times they can't do anything to make them better. Many of my patients suffered the tortures of the damned. And because I was the one inflicting much of that pain, I took it home with me. |
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