Tag Archives: death

Shelter From the Storm

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The images of the destruction from Hurricane Sandy are just devastating. The heaviness in my heart for those impacted by this storm is immense. I have no doubt that many people are writing about this event, often from a first-hand perspective, and those not writing about it are more likely simply living it.

When I got my children off to school today, I turned on the news and began to see the images and hear the stories. They were all overwhelming, but when I heard about the back-up generator failing at New York University Medical Center, I felt my heart stop and my stomach drop. As a former hospital nurse, I instantly felt the nightmare of that scenario. To be completely honest with you, it was probably one of my biggest fears while I worked at one of the major trauma centers in my city. The thought of having to evacuate even the most stable patient is overwhelming, but when you realize that many of the patients who had to be evacuated from NYU were critically ill, it is almost unimaginable.

Forget the multiple IV machines and other medical equipment needed to keep these patients alive, you also have to take into account the fact that many of them were on ventilators. Ventilators, by the way, take power to run. And when that power fails and the back-up power fails, they have to be operated by battery packs. Sounds simple enough, right? Except when you realize that switching over to battery packs on patients who are LITERALLY being kept alive by mechanical ventilation is not something that you have endless amounts of time to do. In fact, you will have to manually ventilate the patient (as in push air with a bag by hand…you have seen it in the movies and on TV) until you can safely get the battery pack in place. And this is not just one patient, y’all. It was many, many people, including infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit. In the middle of the night. With a hurricane raging outside.

Ambulances lined up and waiting. Photo credit: @bananarams on Twitter

You have to get all of these patients, who are most likely unstable on a good day, out of the hospital and through the flooding streets to nearby hospitals. Which, by the way, I would be willing to guess were already a little overwhelmed themselves. There is no way to adequately prepare for this scenario. You can have every disaster code in the world and every practice drill you can imagine, but when reality hits you go into pure survival mode. Literal, lifesaving survival mode. Because as the medical professional in the situation, it is your job, it is your ethical code, it is your moral responsibility. And I would be willing to bet that it was really, really stressful. As if critical care medicine isn’t stressful enough, right?

One example of the amount of effort needed to move a single critical patient. Photo credit: AP Photo/ John Minchillo

In all I have read that NYU evacuated 215 patients to various area hospitals. Of those 215, ABC News reports that 45 of them were critically ill. When you have a family member who is critically ill, you often feel a sense of comfort to know that they are in the hospital getting care. Somehow you feel as though that insulates them from any other potential danger or disaster. Turns out that is not always true. In fact, it turns out that the one place you would really want to believe will always have power can actually lose it. So then your faith turns to those in charge, and you trust that they will ensure your loved ones’ safety. Only this time, they will be doing it in the dark.

To all of the medical professionals who handled this situation like the professionals that they are, my heart is with you today.

Nora Ephron Made Me Think

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When Nora Ephron died recently I found myself really sad, beyond the normal level of sad given that I didn’t actually know Nora Ephron. At least not in real life. But like so many people who watched her movies and read her work over the years, I felt like I knew her. Heartburn remains to this day one of my favorite movies, and I watched it several times with my mother, so Nora and my mother remain indelibly linked in my mind and in my memory bank.

I immediately wrote my friend Rene Syler over at Good Enough Mother and told her that I wanted to do a piece based on an article I had read about Nora Ephron. It really made me stop and think when I read it and inspired me to want to write my own lists. I would love for you to head over and share your thoughts on what would be on your own lists.

http://goodenoughmother.com/2012/07/doses-of-reality-what-will-you-miss-most-when-youre-gone/

 

Terms of Endearment

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There is a scene at the end of the movie Terms of Endearment where Debra Winger is saying goodbye to her children in her hospital room. My mom and I used to have differing opinions over which part made us cry harder. For me, especially as a teenager, it was always Teddy with his broken face and the obvious heartbreak happening to him right in front of my eyes. For her though, it was Tommy, the older son, the one who was struggling to hold it all together and remain his defiant preteen self. He was trying not to cry and to show that he was just fine. It was what Debra Winger said to him that broke my mother’s heart. She told him that she wanted him to know, to really know in his heart, that she knew he loved her. She did not want him to be left with the guilt that so often settles into those left behind when they know they didn’t say it enough or show it enough, especially to their mothers. So she made sure, as mothers so often do, to be selfless in that moment, to comfort him, even if he did not think he needed her comfort. Because she knew he did and would.

http://youtu.be/PuvONUFArdI

Now that I am a mother and now that I have lost a mother, I see why that part mattered to her so much more. It is the less obvious parts of mothering that matter the most in the end. And I think it strikes at the very core of our fear in mothering that we wonder to ourselves, in our darkest moments…if I die tomorrow, will my children know how very I loved them and how much I know they loved me?

Having celebrated another Mother’s Day, I really feel that way. Did my own mother know that I really did love her, despite all the ways that she attempted to make herself unlovable to me? Does she somehow know, somewhere that she is in fact missed, probably far more than she would have ever imagined possible when she was alive?

More than that, though, I wonder if my own girls know how very much I love them, especially when I think of the moments where I lose my patience. Because I remember those moments with my own mother, and I certainly didn’t feel like she loved me very much at those times. I just remember thinking that she was crazy. Sadly, honestly, that is probably what my children think, too. And they are right, because in those moments I am crazy, and I suppose I can take a small measure of comfort in knowing that I am not alone in feeling that way. Thank God for the women around me who tell me that they feel the same way or do the same things or that their children look at them with the same eyes of bewilderment and fear and sadness.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all bad. I am not here to do some sort of public flogging of myself or to ask for kudos for a job well done. As always, I just want to share the truth of how I am feeling and hope that someone reading says to themselves, “Girl, I hear you, and I feel the same way.”

These very same little people, who I scold, who I sometimes hurt with my tone, my sharpness, my quickness to react, still look at me with love in their eyes as they call me Mommy. They still give me cards saying I am a rock star and thank me for being theirs. Which is funny to me in a way, because I feel like the thanking should be the other way around. I should thank them for being mine.

 

Hearts Do Not Have Colors

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Oh Sybrina Fulton, you break my heart with your words, with your grace, with your kindness, with your dignity, with your strength. Should I ever find myself facing a difficult situation, may I show even 1% of your character. You are the true definition of what it means to be a mother.

And how I wish for you that today had been the end, instead of the beginning, how I wish for you that today had been an end of your suffering instead of another stepping stone toward learning a new normal, which seems like a normal no one should ever have to learn.

How I hope for you that you can know what your son, your child, your baby boy has done for so many people around this country for the past 44 days, and while it will do nothing to repair the permanent ache in your soul, may it salve the wound in your heart. Your child, your Trayvon caused so many of us to rise up from our normal lives of being moms and sit down and say to ourselves, enough is enough.

I listened to the words of Angela Corey tonight in my minivan on the radio with my two daughters in the backseat, and I cried when she announced the charge against George Zimmerman. I said a little prayer that I hope somewhere in heaven my mom met Trayvon and maybe she shared with him how her own father took her so many years ago to a little tiny church in Memphis, TN to hear a relatively unknown man named Martin Luther King, Jr. preach. Or how when that man later went on to be brutally gunned down, her own father risked his job in that same city and walked out of his office when they would not lower the flag to half staff. And maybe Trayvon shared with her that he just wanted some Skittles and a cold drink to watch some basketball. Maybe he even shared that on the nights he probably did dream of being a hero, this wasn’t the way he imagined. Or anyone could have imagined.

My daughter asked me after I turned off the radio why this was even a case? She said, “They know who was shot. They know who shot him. Why is this even a case, Mommy?”

Sweet girl, I do not know.

Then she broke my heart even more.

“What was the boy doing that made the man shoot him?”

And the answer is so simple and so rending. Nothing. He was doing nothing, my baby, but just walking down the street. The man thought he looked suspicious because he was black.

“Why would a black person look suspicious? Black people aren’t suspicious. Celeste is black and she is my friend and she would never be suspicious.”

And there you have it. For my eight year-old, it is simple and clear.

I wish it were so for everyone.