Laus Deo

Everyone has good days and bad days. Everyone experiences tragic heart break and overwhelming joy.

A bad day is when you meet a man who is talking to you, who simply woke up a few days ago, feeling not great. Seemingly a simple cold. By a fluke, one of the nurses just happened to direct the man to go to the doctor. Less than a week later he was dead. Cancer. In less than a week, he went from feeling great to dead. The family was unprepared, unable to let this young man go. We visited him in the ICU, and found him surrounded by machines that performed every function of life, filtered his blood, paced his heart, filled his lungs. On top of that, chemotherapy. No lengths would go untried to save this mans life.
Miracles happen, and they would give this man every opportunity to receive one. This time, the miracle was that his suffering was brief.

That same day, we get toned to a "man down" and on our drive over we speculate as the cause. A diabetic emergency? trauma? low oxygen? our update came in, "CPR in progress". As we pulled in, several dozen people were frantically jumping up and down, screaming and waving like we could possibly miss a horde of people all pointing the same way. Indeed, CPR had been in progress and the man wasn't doing well. We took him emergent to the hospital. He was our first C0R save. (started out dead, ended up less dead)

It's hard to put into words after a shift like that, how the shift went.
"We watched as one man suffered cancer in the last few hours of his life." I could try to explain.
Yet in the same breath " We really got to help someone today, someone who was really dead this time" How do you tell someone that this was one of the toughest and one of the best shifts?

How do you explain to the regular person that for the first time in your peace-making life, you thought about punching someone, because you learned that their 10 year old kid accidentally killed himself, trying to make himself sick to just get away from their parent.

How do you describe the highway roll over where nobody survived and you know you SHOULD feel horrified, but instead you're amped up and know you did your best.

How do you describe these things to those who don't know?

You don't. You just tell them that things are good. And business as usual at work.