My Work Place
...s on a ventilator, a feeding machine, and with the needles inserted in his left hand. All this was to keep him alive. He was slowly losing his ability to control his muscles; he couldn't talk, so I learned to lip-read what he wanted, which wasn't an easy task for either of us. I didn't stop trying, and he didn't give up on me. After a while, we were able to communicate fairly well. When I talked about my friends, school classes, and the weather, he would mostly listen to me and not ask any questions. I cried when I found out that he had died. I knew it would happen one day; I just didn't want to lose my friend. After thinking about it for so long, I believed I was strong enough to take the emotion. But I was wrong. I also took care of an 18-year-old that had been in a car accident. He was a normal teenager and was having fun on a Saturday night. He was a passenger in that car, and his drunken friend was trying to impress his girlfriend. He had been put in the neurology unit because they suspected that he might have damaged his spinal cord or brain. Thirty minutes later he was laying on a hospital bed in a neck brace with the horror of having a surgery. I knew he was afraid, so I talked to him about school, sports, anything to get his mind off of the surgery. I think that made him feel better, but I was still mad at the one who had put him there. Hospital work isn't all sad. Sometimes it's happy and even funny. I took care of a very sweet lady who had been a nurse when she ...