"He's Better than on Friday."
Two days later the nurse on the Burn Intensive Care Ward told me,
"The 75% burn patient, 36 years old, he's better than on Friday." I went to the twelfth floor where I had seen him last. 
Then I came down to the Emergency Room to get my drawing paper to draw the nurses bathing him. I hadn't taken my paper at first, as I did not ex
pect to find him alive. The residents all thought that he would be gone by now, too, and were reassured by the news.
Red, raw tissue on his face and front and back, like a roasted pig! Even though they knew he would die, the nurses treated him so gently.
Upstairs again, I watched the nurses handle the patient, who was attached to a Foley catheter, a respirator and a feeding tube. They turned him on his side to apply the salve and change his sheets. They sucked out his airway when the monitor bell rang, c
hecked his feeding sac and placed his hands in bandages and hung them from
overhead rings. 
The four nurses were in an Intensive Care Program, training in new burn nursing techniques. Ordinarily there are not so many nurses to help. There was little hope for the patient to live. He would die from infection from the wound, the tracheotomy or from lung damage; the inhalation of gases would overtax him. She showed me where incisions were made along his arm to relieve pressure from swelling. Their gentleness was exquisite. I drew with fear that my tears would drop on the paper and spread the i nk. I kept thinking, "All this care and they know he is going to die."
A massive cardiac arrest gets EKG, shock and massage. How very hard it is for the young medical staff to accept the fact that the patient was 'Dead On Arrival'.
Back in the Red Blanket inner area of the Emergency Room, the staff was trying to revive a woman who came in with no audible heart beat. They had given a calcium injection, Adrenaline, massage and electric shock. Actually the woman may have been Dead on
Arrival. They, too, faced failure. Their feelings of omnipotence were being challenged.
Desperate attempts to revive a patient. She's dead and still they try!
Department of Emergency Medicine
