55 Days: Pulling People Out of the River

“There comes a time when we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.” –Desmond Tutu

“Fentanyl baby” — that’s how I answered Sarah when she asked, “How was your day?” as I crossed the threshold into our house after what felt like a longer-than-usual shift at the hospital.

Before I could drop my backpack to the floor, she wrapped her arms around me. I buried my head in her shoulder and added, “Second one this week.”

There’s this weird phenomenon in the hospital: problems seem to arrive in waves. This week it was fentanyl ingestions. Last week it was teenagers diagnosed with terminal diseases. The week before that, children with life-threatening gunshot wounds.

When people ask how I can do this work, day in and day out, I tell them, “I work three days a week. That means I have four days to recover.”

If I were to answer more honestly, though, I’d say, “I’m new to this job. I’m still figuring that out.”

For three days a week, I show up in the moment, I put my personal feelings aside, I hold space for families who are living their worst nightmares, and I offer whatever we have available to lighten their social and emotional loads (which, by the way, is never enough).

By the end of my Monday-through-Wednesday run, I’m pretty numb. So, when I buried my head in Sarah’s shoulder last night, I did not cry. I just . . . reported?

That’s how my weekly “recovery” usually begins: with a HIPPA-compliant* accounting — usually just to myself — of each of the ‘cases’ I have seen. Slowly, I unpack the containers I have put each experience in over the past three days.

I take out the call to the front desk to mediate a conflict between an irate mother of a patient struggling with medically refractory epilepsy, and a receptionist who did a less-than-compassionate job of enforcing the hospital’s visitation rule.

I take out the image of an emaciated toddler’s creped skin, remembering how her brow shifted from worry to curiosity as I sang her the song my grandfather used to sing to me.

I take out the uncomfortable exchange with a staff member whom I asked to consider that “skinny brown baby” might not equal “call Child Protective Services.”

I take out the first fentanyl-exposed baby and his cherubic, sleeping face framed by brown ringlets.

I take out the second fentanyl-exposed baby — his wide blue eyes staring at me over his father’s shoulder, his mother’s weary “thank you” when I offered to get her a hot meal.

When I have unpacked them all, when my self-protective barriers have softened a bit, I can move to honoring the lives I have witnessed.

Maybe I visualize a healing light pouring toward them, surrounding each of them in warmth and peace.

(It should be noted: I do this for me, not for them. I have no illusions about my healing powers. These families need so much more than any light I can conjure.)

Maybe I draw representations of the week’s patients in my journal while breathing slowly and intentionally: love on the in-breath, peace on the out-breath.

Eventually, I feel clear and ready to go back to this job I love, this work that is as fulfilling as it is difficult.

I’m in the early stage of my recovery-from-work routine this morning, and I’m realizing as I write this, that the heaviest lift in this job is not witnessing the traumas these patients and families go through. Standing beside people in their most vulnerable moments — it is a true honor and a privilege.

The hard part is knowing how much worse those moments are made by the gaping holes in our country’s social supports, by institutionalized racism and classism, by our inability to affect meaningful change in the systems that continually fail the most vulnerable among us.

It’s knowing that many of the traumas I witness are a predictable outcome of those lacking systems.

It’s knowing that the hospital is in the business of, in the words of Desmond Tutu, “pulling people out of the river,” when what we really need is more people upstream, helping fix the systems that keep pushing people in.

***

*Identifying details of all patients, families, and incidents have been omitted or changed.

Cheryl Dumesnil is a poet, writer, editor, and writing coach, with a side hustle as a medical social worker. Her books include three poetry collections, What Is Left to Say, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes and In Praise of Falling; a memoir, Love Song for Baby X; and the anthologies We Got This: Solo Mom Stories of Grit, Heart, and Humor and Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. To learn more about her work, visit cheryldumesnil.com.