Sew Sleepy

 Tough to sleep tonight even though I am tired.  It could be the street-vendor taco I had for lunch, or maybe it is the back-ache from sewing.

Well, I am glad I did that suture practice clinic a few months back. It came in useful today for a fellow with multiple facial and scalp lacerations.  They needed more hands on board sewing him back up, and he was not the most serious trauma in the small ER.  So I could keep suturing him up, while other staff members rushed to another patient brought in by ambulance, who coded right there.   Two hours of leaning over a hospital bed, two of us at once suturing, sometimes three. and there was more left to do.

I heard the Code behind me go from deathly silence, to the beep, beep, beep of  steady heart rhythm, to the patient crying on the bed from behind the bag mask.  Sobbing, grateful to be alive.  And we kept sewing. And the patient with the lacerations was relieved and so were we all because we were all in that room together.  The doctors with the patient who coded were laughing, that joyous laugh, and saying, man, don't cry you  are alive, you were spared.

And I think we all thought about what we were grateful for, and the patient still covered in black dried blood and fresh oozing red blood under my needle asked if his parents knew he was there and if he could go home, and wash and change. I think the shock was wearing off, but I also think that hope and gratitude are contagious, and right there, in that room, we had just seen a dead man come back to life, and a guy who seemed cut to pieces slowly put back together.  Makes me pretty damn grateful just thinking about it.