We can all think of people, maybe we never knew them personally, who had great talent and potential and they just chucked it all by living very badly. Kurt Cobain was probably one such person. Robert Downey Jr. may yet snuff himself out, but so far he's proven he can outlast some of his problems.
One of my favorite examples of this type of person was Jaco Pastorius, bass guitarist for the seminal fusion-group Weather Report. He literally revolutionized the use of that instrument, changing it forever. Not too many people do things like that. But he succumbed to heroin and died violently, at too young an age.
"What a waste of life," people say.
Sometimes I get a pretty close look.
A short time ago this patient overdosed on methamphetamine, developed a hypertensive blood-pressure crisis, and with that a parenchymal bleed into the ventricles. There may have been a stabbing or a gunshot along with the overdose scenario.
Drugs and trauma. Oh, great.
The nice neurosurgeons put a hole in their skull and drained away that, but a lot of life got drained away with it. The patient had this wierd decerebate posturing with their left arm, preferring to hold it straight down their side with the fist turned outwards. They could move their right arm and leg some, always pulling at the tube that supplied air to their tracheostomy collar.
Their tongue deviated left.
Aphasic, but I did not know if that was global or just expressive, meaning: they could not talk, but did they understand what was being said in within their hearing? I hope not much.
Easy patient, really. Suction every couple of hours, turn and position, wipe up their crap, feed them through the PEG tube inserted into their stomache, dangling like a long, thin, latex umbilical cord. Come back later and repeat.
That's all there is for this person for the rest of their life. And they were young, as in not as old as I am. Not halfway through an average American lifespan.
Suction every couple of hours, turn and position, wipe up their crap, feed them through the PEG tube inserted into their stomache, dangling like a long, thin, latex umbilical cord. Come back later and repeat. Empty urinary catheter bag.
Suction every couple of hours, turn and position, wipe up their crap, feed them through the PEG tube inserted into their stomache, dangling like a long, thin, latex umbilical cord. Come back later and repeat.
Transfer patient to long-term-care facility, where they will spend their lives trapped in that looping paragraph, until a bad case of pneumonia or urosepsis finally kills them.
Aside from having to confront that gloomy existential abyss of a life on and off during the day, it was otherwise a pretty good shift. That's the horror of it. It's too easy.
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3 comments:
At this point, is the job any different than what a hospice nurse would do?
That's a rhetorical question. My mother is a hospice nurse and she has to muddle through this kind of garbage regularly. Keep up the good work.
yeah, too easy, but still painful to watch. you know, like i sometimes think these people were never given a second chance, or the circumstance never gave them the willpower to give second or third or fourth chances a a try. just sad.
I am a big band bass player about to post an entry about Jaco and I came across your posting. You illuminate his tragedy in a new way, for me, at least, and I appreciate it.
I really admire you for the work you do, which I think few of us could endure. I had to think about that sentence a lot because any brief description of what you do sounds like euphemism.
Thanks for providing people some succor in their extremity.
- Jerry
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