Nursing in the 70s Part 6 - Enter the Grim Reaper

The very first patient I ever touched died. Not a brilliant start to my nursing career you might think. The circumstances around this were simple. I had been asked to take an elderly patient to the toilet. He was a few days post - op following a relatively minor procedure. It was my first clinical allocation, working one evening on a surgical ward.

It was a quiet evening and the Staff Nurse in charge suggested that I escort the patient to the toilet. We walked together down the ward arm in arm, me feeling useful, he desperate to use a proper toilet at last after all those commodes. When we arrived at the cubicle I made sure he was sitting comfortably and waited a discrete distance outside with the door slightly ajar. I remember clearly how quiet it was, no tell tale sounds from the cubicle and more worryingly no response to my repeated 'Are you OK?' I gave him a few more seconds and then gently pushed the door open. He was slumped against the cistern and I assumed he had fallen asleep. It became increasingly obvious that he was not asleep. I called to the Staff Nurse and managed to lift him onto the floor 'Get the bloody oxygen!' someone yelled. I hadn't a clue where that was but luckily someone else did. More people arrived and I was told to screen the beds in the main ward. It was my first resuscitation and unfortunately my first death.

Nothing prepares you for something like that I was 20 years old and had never seen death up close before and all through a career which lasted over 25 years I never 'got used to it' as some observers might say - all you do is learn to adjust to dealing with it.

Nurses always pick up the pieces after everyone has gone and I was asked to help with the 'last offices' for the patient. 'You don't have to now, but you will have to some time' said the Staff Nurse.

I agreed with her and assisted.

People die in hospital. Sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly - in a twinkling of an eye they're gone and as I went through my nursing career I saw this many times. I can't actually remember if we had been given tutorials covering bereavement during PTS, it was an area that was and to some extent still is taboo. Dealing with death as a nurse was something you learnt, like many things in life 'as you go along'. The experienced nurses I worked with had all cared for dying patients.. All had performed 'last offices' for the patient and all had comforted relatives. But these were all practical things, things that nurses are good at and besides how and what could you teach to someone sitting with a dying patient or comforting a distraught relative?

The very essence of caring is often just about being there, someone to listen, someone 's hand to hold, just that.

Part 7