It isn't just about covid

I take xrays for a living.  In April, I will have been at my job for 25 years.  It blows people away that I have been there for so long.  I don't know why.  I kind of grew up in an age when that was to be expected and commended.  Longevity meant something.  Holy cow! I just realized that I am gonna be 50 this year and I have been taking xrays for half of my life.  lol!  Oh my stars!  lol!  Anyway...off to the reason for my post.

I am tired some days. Some days I am more tired than others. (I think part of it is because of my age. lol!)  Anyhoo!  We are two years into covid.  Two years.  I can honestly say that I am not tired because of covid.  Allow me to explain.  :)

Most people think of healthcare workers as nurses and doctors.  They are super important.  Life saving in fact.  Heroes even.  And in our area, with so much union talk, and how nurses are treated, you would honestly think they are the only people that work at our hospital.  Please be patient.  I am not a nurse/doctor hater.  Please continue to read my story.

I am one of many people that work at the hospital.  I even hate to begin to name the people that are involved in the care of one patient.  BUT!  Here I go.  Registration, respiratory, EVS (the folks that clean), lab, nutrition, ekg, radiology, transport, cna's, nurses, physicians, security, and just like that I am now drawing a blank. haha!

Did you know that radiology alone houses CT (computed tomography), NM (nuclear medicine), US (ultrasound), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), and Diagnostic (plain film xrays).  There is also Specials (Interventional Radiology), but at our hospital they are not part of our department.  That is a lot of different specialties.  There is a minimum of a two year degree to do any of these (as far as I know).  We have a lot of schooling to do what we do. And a lot of math!  I hate math!  And science.  lol

Our hospital is an 815 bed hospital!  815!!  That is how many patients we can have! At the hospital!  Umm, the Emergency Room can hold 100 I believe.  Not sure if the 815 includes the 100 or not.  Either way.  That is a lot of patients.  On any given day there are 16 people working in just diagnostic xray.  (Right now that is a good day. lol)  If you divide 815 by 16 employees, that is a minimum of 50 patients per xray tech.  Nurses are busy.  They are short staffed in most areas.  Even up to 8 patients per nurse.  I am by no means comparing the two. (Well maybe I am a smidge.)  Anyway, we have a ton of patients!  A TON!!

Point of my story!  You know the first patient I ever xrayed, EVER, in the ER, as a first year student, was a little older woman who had reached over her stove and her little gown had caught on fire.  She was very badly burned.  I could not get that smell out of my nose.  I thought to myself..."I am not cut out for this".  I was in my mid 20's.  Oh my goodness.  I went home and cried.

Over time I went to work at the children's outpatient clinic at our hospital.  Oh man! That was the most rewarding part of my job that I ever had. Kids are amazing!  They handle pain and life long illness way better than adults.  Man I met some of the most precious humans.  One little boy had OI, osteogenesis imperfecta.  Oh he was precious, and so were his parents.  We saw him on multiple occasions.  But he was just brittle as can be.  One wrong move and we could break a bone so easily.  It was here, at the children's clinic, that I also learned the fine art of a "bone survey".  A bone survey is a series of images done on little ones who they mostly suspect have been abused.  (There is the rare occasion they do them for genetic disorders.)  This is my most proud yet most unsatisfying skill.  Oh I feel like I am pretty good at them but I despise that they exist.  Child abuse. It is an extremely ugly part of our society.  Eyes swollen shut, burns, bruises, and/or deformed body parts.  Oh I love those babies. I pray over them. I ask them where they live and tell them Aunt Neice will come take care of their abuser.  Don't worry. They are never old enough to tell me or to understand what I mean.  I would though.  I just talk to them.  I want them to feel loved, if even for the 30 minutes I have them.  I don't trust you when you come in with your child for that reason. I can't.  I am there for my patient.  I trust what their bones tell me.  Their bones tell the story.  They cry. I hold them.  (It is my consolation prize for making them take 20ish xrays.)  All the while wondering what horrors they have had to see at such a young age.  I love on them.  We see them. All of them.

Car accident, after construction accident, after fall accident.  Any trauma. You name it.  Traumas. We see all of them.  Shootings, stabbings, car accidents, fights, etc.  They are devastating.  A life cut short, or at the very least altered forever.  We see all of them.  I have had to xray a child that was shot (and died mind you and so did three others) and xray the shooter in the room next to them. I want you to understand that you are actually in the room with these patients. You do seem them take their last breath. You do it though.  It's what we do.  We see all of them.

I have had a patient with maggots crawling through their leg due to insufficient care from a wound.  Oh the smell.  Not good after lunch.  :(  You do it though. 

On one particular work day, there was a patient recently diagnosed with lung cancer, with sudden onset of difficulty breathing, and turns out fluid had filled one lung.  They were terrified.  Another young patient was so badly injured they wished for death.  Their injuries were from a car wreck that occurred well over a month ago. They didn't want to live anymore. They had multiple injuries. Another with cancer that was just in a terrible amount of pain. They just pushed through and did the xrays, no matter how painful. I held their hand (all of them) and told them I was sorry.  That we would get them taken care of and help them.  I left work and sat in my car and cried.

I am not telling these things so you will say "awe poor thing", "oh goodness I'm so sorry", "oh you are...blah blah whatever".  I tell you this because there is so much more to what I do than covid.  But while we are on it. I (WE, everyone in my department) do covid too. ALL the covid.  We visit every covid room in the hospital.  I can look at your xray and tell if you have covid and covid pneumonia. However, they are a small portion of what I do.

In addition to those very few I mentioned above, we also check pacemakers, pneumonia, pneumothorax, any broken bone in your body, line placements, arthritis, tube placements, swallow studies, aspiration, more cancers, and a ton of different surgery cases.  Hey, guess what, I have only mentioned what happens in the diagnostic portion of radiology....and that isn't even the half of it.

Sometimes I look at an xray and my heart sinks.  I look up at the patient and smile.  (Well not that you can see it that much anymore with masks.)  "Thank you so much honey. Hope you get to feeling better."  You offer a "is there anything else I can do for you before I go".  And off you go...to the next patient.  To the next heart wrenching story.

So my point?  We were tired before covid...not because of covid.  We are tired of jerks that beat up kids, people that do drugs, cancer, flu, obesity, car accidents, occupational accidents, diabetes, strokes, homelessness...I can't even begin to continue the list of what I am tired of.

   

Pictures for self promotional purposes. ;) I hate to sound rude but I am tired of the "whoa as me I am a healthcare worker during covid".  This!  This is our job!  This is what we chose to do.  Times have been tough off and on for years. There is an ebb and flow in healthcare.  Has been for years.  And now all of healthcare is for profit. 

Healthcare is hard. This is not new territory.  End of story.  Just go hug all the healthcare people you know.  Not just nurses and doctors.  It truly takes us all to help you and to get you the care you need.  And not just because of covid.  But because cancer sucks and there are mean people in the world.  Some days are just harder than others.  Much love to all those that work in healthcare.

Kenny's healing was not for him...

I just wanted to take a minute and put down Kenny's covid story.  I am not 100% convinced he was healed for his own sake.  I'll tell you why.  

This is the account leading up to him being admitted. Kenny got sick the first week of December. He did not want to go to the doctor since he felt like he only had a sinus infection. He is so stubborn.  He tried one day but the urgent care forgot about him outside and he left and came home after two hours of waiting.  On Friday after almost a week total of being sick, I made him go to a different urgent care where he tested positive for Covid.  By that night he was getting worse, so off to the ER we went.  He was given a steroid and an inhaler and sent home.  He had a chest xray while he was there and it showed no pneumonia.  Monday morning he was doing pretty bad (of course he tried not to let me know) he told me he was going to just go Pardee to get the infusion because they had been trying to fit him in since Friday and they wouldn't return his call.  Kenny got the infusion and his O2 sats dropped, so they took him next door to their ER.  I would just like to say this...I will not return to Pardee.  The ER was very ugly and wouldn't even let me talk to Kenny.  I wanted him out of there. The doctor even told me that I have no say over his care.  Okay...I will leave it there. He came out and we went straight to Mission.  I work there. I am more comfortable there. I know he will be taken care of there. (Even though it feels like most of this area hates Mission hospital, there are good people there.)

So now is the story of his time in the hospital.  We went to the ER and after waiting several hours, he got a room. They did a CT and his lungs looked awful. I knew he was sick but I just wasn't prepared for him to be in that bad of shape. They were bad.  This is what I do and I see lungs all day long.  His, especially for two days time, looked really bad.  I cried.  He was admitted a short time later and I was able to go with him.  I prayed for Kenny. Prayed he would not get any worse.  I was nervous a little I think, but I felt like he would be ok.  I think.  This is Monday night.

He seemed consistent until Wednesday. Wednesday afternoon/evening I had him all squared away.  He had eaten, he was sitting in a chair, gone to the bathroom, his tray was beside him, and he had a full water.  I took that time to run grab me something to eat and I was back in 10 minutes. I would do that for food.  I would run to the cafeteria and grab a bite or get doordash, thanks to my amazing coworkers.  I was never gone very long to grab food.  Like 10 minutes.  This night when I got back he was back in the bed again.  I freaked a bit and asked why.  He said he had been there the whole time, he had yelled for me, thought I had been gone for an hour, and all kinds of crazy stuff.  His O2 sats looked fine, so I just decided he maybe was just fatigued?  I don't know, I wasn't prepared for that.  A couple of hours go by and his night nurse comes in for meds. He talks to him for at least five minutes.  The nurse goes over to the computer and Kenny looks dead at me and wants to know who they are and what are they doing there. Mind you they were completely suited up, gown, PAPR hood (see below), the whole nine yards, so I can see how he might have been concerned.  lol!  But no! He had no idea he had been talking to them.  I looked at that nurse and was like we have a huge problem. And that was our first bad night.  Kenny was hypoxic.  The nurse had no clue because he had not been with him until then.  He hadn't come in to his room when is O2 sats would dip down. (He was my least favorite nurse, who I am pretty sure was a 12 year old traveler.)  Kenny was not doing good.  He escalated quickly to vapotherm and was put on 45L of O2 at first on 60%. That moved up quickly to 60L at 90%.  So we got to see lab, respiratory, and xray within no time.  Again saw his lungs and they were even worse than on Monday. I was terrified to be quite honest. I knew where this was headed.  

This and a bright yellow gown can be a little terrifying I guess. lol

I had been texting with family and close friends for prayer.  I immediately turned to them again. Urgently!  We had nothing else. No other hope for him to improve. Kenny is pretty private and I knew he didn't want a lot of people to know, so I had kept it to just our family and close friends to message.  Respiratory, charge nurse, they were all saying that he was declining rapidly. That he would be most likely headed towards a vent. That it happens very quickly and he could need that soon. I got him calm (breathing wise) and asleep and I just prayed.  My family and friends were praying. I was standing over him, I placed my hands on his back and I just prayed.  This same night I had a friend tell me to place my hands on him as she prayed over him.  Lots of prayers!

At one point on this night, I literally told the Lord, "I need you to see me".  Yes, I know this is about Kenny.  He was the one sick. But this is the point of my story....I don't think his healing is about him.  A little back story.  I have not been to church since March of 2020. (Well I did one time with Kenni last year to a sweet church in Swannanoa.)  I honestly have no desire to go. The church can be a hurtful place.  Honestly, I felt abandoned.  Like I didn't matter to Him.  Like He didn't see me anymore. I have been hurt. You will never hear me say I am a perfect person. Ever!  I'm not!  Too often though, if you don't fit a certain mold, you don't fit in, and you don't belong.  I haven't felt like I could get a prayer past the tip of my fingers.  I felt like I had really let the Lord down somehow, for Him to let me go through the things I was going through. Going through at the hands of "His people". To feel as lost as I did.  Wounds are deep when they come from within.  I NEEDED to see the Lord with Kenny's sickness and his healing. I needed to know, that through it all, I still mattered to Him.  This may sound selfish or self righteous.  Not at all.  I needed God!  I needed Him to show up and show off!  And as much as I was dependent on other's prayers...I needed Him to hear mine.

Thursday came and he was on the 60L for the next few days.  We had some hard talks on those next few days.  Where is this paperwork and that paperwork. He told me to sell all of his "toys" when he passed because I could use that money.  He told me he was tired of fighting and wanted to quit.  He wanted me to make sure the girls knew how much he loved them.  Lots of things said that I didn't want to be said or talk about.  He was giving up.  I just kept praying.

Sunday night was the first I posted on social media about Kenny.  He wasn't doing great but I knew more prayer would get him better.  I needed more prayers for him. I thought this is it. It will be the "volume" needed.  Sunday night was awful. haha!  He did worse after I asked for prayers. I was like ...ummm...this is not the way this works Lord.  I ask for more prayers... he gets better.  Got it?  haha!  Nope.  Kenny had another really bad night.  I think it was early Monday morning when the night nurse told me that he was going to get moved to the unit and she ordered a pulmonary consult. (Weird, I know, that he wasn't being followed by them already.)  I was devastated.  We were going in the wrong direction again.  I immediately alerted my ever faithful prayer chain. I refused to let this happen. I was praying so hard.  And I was coaching him.  I coached him and coached him.  I convinced them to just give him a chance.  In the night we had taken him off vapotherm because he was just so restless and he had the nasal canula and a non-rebreather on at the same time. Both of which were set at 15 L.  I was like Kenny honey....we gotta stay here babe.  We are not going back on that vapotherm.  You can do this! We are holding steady.  We are not going to the unit.  We are not going back on that. I just kept begging him to breathe. Encouraging rather.  Just really kept him focused.  All the while....praying.  As I said above, I needed God to hear my prayers and heal him.

The doctor came in that morning and for whatever reason...he agreed. He thought Kenny was going to improve and didn't see why he needed the unit.  He felt like we could wait a bit.  He thought he might be ok to stay on the 15L since his sats were ok.  But he did say it would be several days before he could come down from there.  Maybe even weeks.  You have to be on 6L to go home.  It was then that I issued a plea to pray for that requirement to come down.  Saturday was Christmas!  I wanted to be home with the girls for Christmas.

From there the story flies. On Thursday morning the dr felt like if he could handle 6L he could go home that day!  I couldn't believe my ears.  It truly was a miracle. Kenny, just in the wee hours of Monday morning was facing the unit and a vent.  But here we were on Thursday afternoon heading home.

I prayed more during Kenny's almost two weeks in the hospital than I have in years!  I knew God could heal Him and somehow...even though in the dark of night I would cry and plead with Him as I watched the monitor (all night long)...I knew He heard me.  And of all the prayers that were going up...I knew that He had heard mine.

Oh I'm not going to pretend like the hurt is gone.  But the ones that hurt me were people.  Not God.  Also not going to pretend that I understand why He let any oh my hurts happen.  But I know He loves me.  I am far from perfect. Far from the clean cut, polished version that others maybe expect. I am healing too.  I needed to be heard and healed.  Being heard helped.  Now for the healing and getting back to the one that can heal.