Wow...after finishing the worst year I've ever had, what followed was the worst week I've had in about...7 months...
All I can hope that means is that getting a really frickin' bad week out of the way at the beginning of the year means one less bad week as the year continues, as a good friend of mine put it.
Monday & Tuesday were emotional days, anyway (thank you, Mother Nature), and it really started Tuesday afternoon. With some friends who started talking about a gathering we were all at the night before Will died, then moved on to talking about adorable babies they saw over the holidays. And I'm not mad they were talking about either one...I said when all this initially happened that I didn't want people to feel like they had to walk on eggshells around me or censor what they would normally say, and I meant that...it was just bad memories on top of bad timing.
Then Wednesday morning, in my first group, towards the end, I had a patient look in my direction & say (although I don't know if it was actually to me or a delusion), "Remember when you and me were together, and we had that beautiful family with that precious baby boy? What was his name again? I think his name was William..." I froze, compartmentalized & saved my reaction for later. Then dealt with another patient in the 2nd hour with lingering grief over the loss of their mother from when they were young.
Had a little mini-breakdown at lunchtime, then finished out my day...
Then Wednesday night, our Netflix movie for that day was Sicko, a Michael Moore film about the sad state of healthcare in America. After watching that & Capitalism: A Love Story, I'm pretty much completely disgusted with our government as a whole, but that's another blog entry. During Sicko, there was a woman who was interviewed. Several years back, her daughter had been born with some kind of health defect, and when her daughter was 18 months old, she stopped breathing. The mother called 911, and they rushed her daughter to the nearest hospital. The hospital called her insurance, and her insurance said they would not cover emergency room or ambulance costs since that hospital wasn't an "in network" hospital. The hospital wouldn't treat the woman's daughter, and she begged and pleaded with them until they finally arranged transportation for her daughter to the "in network" hospital. They arrived just in time for her daughter to go into cardiac arrest. She goes on to say that the EMT's worked on her daughter for 30 minutes before taking her into the back room and telling her that they were unable to revive her. She talks of how she went in the room where her daughter was and just held her and told her how sorry she was that she couldn't save her...and all of a sudden, I'm back in the emergency room at Frye Hospital, pacing and praying and begging and pleading with whatever Higher Power will listen, and I'm in the back room where they take the families and the loved ones who aren't so lucky, and I'm in the room where they worked on him, holding him and marveling at how cold & stiff his skin is...I probably should've turned the movie off, but it was like watching a car wreck happen...you just can't look away.
Thursday was my completely emotionally exhausted day, where I spent the morning exhausted & pretty bitchy to anyone who crossed my path, and that afternoon was probably the best part of my week. Then, Friday was the day that lots of things went wrong with groups and work in general.
Altogether, a week I was more than happy to see end...
And the part that upsets me the most is that work was supposed to be my save haven. After everything happened, and after I went back to work, it was almost like an escape. I mean, yes, of course, it all still weighed very heavy on my heart & on my mind. But, at work, I had to focus on other people, and although I allowed myself the moments of tears & deep breaths, work was the one place I was safe. It was the one place the grief wasn't supposed to come and hit me in the face.
But, it did...and I don't know, maybe in the grand scheme of things, it was a good thing that it did. I've definitely had a tendency to throw myself, my heart, my soul, into work these past 7 months, and maybe this was life's way of making me take a step back...life's way of not allowing me to try and hide so completely in my escape.
Either way, the rest of the year is gonna be better...right?
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