The Most Tragic Day of Your Life, Just Another Day for Me
The Isolated Grief of a Family in the Emergency Room
Content Warning: This article contains descriptions of medical emergencies, trauma, and emotional distress that some readers may find distressing or triggering. Reader discretion is advised.
It was a typical day in the emergency room — busy, chaotic, and noisy.
I was working in the surgical department at the ER, and a sudden “Code Blue”, or more specifically “Trauma Blue”, was called by our triage staff. We immediately put down whatever work we were doing. A patient suffering from severe traumatic injury that needed immediate resuscitation, was coming in.
It was a young woman, a 25-year-old motorbike rider, who crashed directly into a car which was running a red light and turning illegally. You could tell the magnitude of the impact just by looking at the victim. The woman lying in front of us had no consciousness, no heartbeat, with a face so severely injured that her closest friend would not be able to recognize.
We started CPR — chest compression, breathing tube insertion, Bosmin injection, and blood transfusion, with the hope that her heart would start beating again. There was no response. Then, we opened her chest, trying to find the potentially lethal source of bleeding and alleviating the pressure caused by her own blood. Thirty minutes later, her EKG still showed a flat line.
It was a tug-of-war against grim reaper. And we lost.
Her mother arrived a few minutes later. And she could not believe what she had just heard. The attending surgeon came and was like, “The injury was too catastrophic. We did everything we could. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it. We are so sorry for your loss.” His words were clear, calm, straightforward and devoid of much emotion.
The mother literally could not stand still anymore. She fell to the ground, crying in disbelief and shouting in denial. A man who appeared to be the patient’s partner tried everything he could to console the mother while experiencing the same excruciating pain.
At that moment, the attending surgeon and the residents on duty, including myself, had turned our attention to other patients in the ER waiting for our care, leaving the heartbroken family crying, alone. I happened to be doing an ultrasound exam on a patient 5 feet away from the crying family. Every bit of their devastation was weighing heavily on me, involuntarily.
The nurses and the cleaning staff, meanwhile, had packed the body and cleaned up all the mess, making room for the next potential Code Blue to strike at any time.
All these happened within 90 minutes. If you came just a bit later, it was like nothing had happened in that trauma bay. Except for the poor family whose tears fell silently and unnoticed by the bustling world around them. I quickly forgot about their existence as I found myself juggling between incoming patients that were considered “more urgent” than a deceased body with grieving family.
We were all in the same room, but not a single doctor or nurse had the time to “be there” with them. By the time I had a brief moment to breathe and think, they had already left the ER.
“Why wasn’t there anyone willing to comfort the family,” you might ask.
“Well, that’s just the cruelty of reality. Everyone working in the ER had better things to do,” I thought to myself.
In fact, an old man who tripped himself and broke his left knee had waited for over an hour, in pain. A little girl with bruises all over her body was just brought in by her mother, after being brutally beaten by her dad. She didn’t even dare to cry.
I said to myself, “If anyone was to blame for this gut-wrenching scene, it should’ve been only that reckless driver.”
BUT…
What if any one of us doctors or nurses spent, say, just 10 more minutes with the family and let them know that they were not alone and that someone understood their agony? The old man in pain and the poor little girl could wait for a few more minutes. Probably.
What if we, as medical professionals, grieve with the family for just 10 minutes before we head back to another side of our hectic reality?
Would that had made a difference? Would that extra few minutes provide any comfort to the family that had just experienced the torment so destructive and seemingly everlasting?
Would it even be worthwhile or justifiable to do so when it meant an inevitable delay for other patients’ care?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I really don’t.
You see, grieving with family means that we have to take off the mask that we have been so arduously trying to keep on to stay “cold-blooded”. If we are no longer protected by that mask, if we try to empathize with that harrowing feeling, are we able to survive when the gruesome reality hits us again and again?
Deep down, I wanted to do something for that family, but I didn’t.
We kept our mask perfectly intact and we moved on.
