I know this to be true, and mostly use it as a defence, to protect my fragile mind, but sometimes, sometimes, things leak through. No man is an island, and this man certainly isn't a rock.
The Christmas period was as horrendously busy as I've ever seen it, and I've worked a few Christmases. The rest of the hospital seems to operate a fingers-in-ears policy; interestingly, a few weeks after Christmas, when all the patients we'd seen had been admitted, and the burden of care was shifted up a level, 'they' sat up and took notice.
Suddenly we were flooded with extra staff, and, as is so often the way, they came on a day when we had precious little to do, having admitted all the sick patients in the area.
Until, of course, after 6 p.m., when everyone goes home.
Except, me.
We've seen a lot of very sick folks in their 20s and 30s, with awful, awful pneumonias. At first I though it was all 'flu related; the histories seemed to fit, and indeed some of them tested positive, but more of them are testing positive for strep. pneumoniae, which I haven't seen before.
Anyway, this shift, the BatPhone went off, twice in quick succession, forewarning of 2 such patients; one slightly older, one younger. The older of the two arrived first, and looked o.k-ish, just confused, in a lights-on-no-one-home sort of way.
The second, a young 'un, looked really sick. All numbers awful, half-dead in the bed already. I had to take no. one to CT, so left her in the more than capable hands of my Registrar and the ITU team.
No. one's CT checked out ok; I'm still not sure what was going on there, but when I came back, no. two had active CPR ongoing. The guys had been trying to site a central line, when her BP dropped from bugger all, to fuck all. A subtle, but important distinction.
Well, we worked as hard as we could, for as long as we could, but nothing worked, not even a flicker.
I hate losing the young ones, especially when I'm not sure why.
The conversation with her dad, was as hard a conversation as I've ever had.
Cases like this leave no-one untouched. They spread ripples of shit everywhere; they can destroy families, and ruin perfectly good clinical staff, like the Reg I left in charge of the case, who is more than capable, but will be asking himself what more, what else he could have done for weeks.
Maybe it's selfish to think of ourselves, but we can't help it.
We're not supposed to lose these ones, and it hurts.
It hurts, but I suppose it's not so much the falling down, as the getting up again afterwards.
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