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“Hey,” she says as the doors drift closed. “Did you hear?” she asks, leaning in like she always does to gossip.
“Hear what?” I ask, and my heart kicks it up a notch as if in preparation for what she’s about to say. I was late to work today. I had a doctor’s appointment this morning and didn’t get in until noon. I should have been here sooner—the appointment was over by nine thirty—but after what happened, I walked the city for miles, considering taking the whole day and letting someone else cover for me, even though I only had shift coverage for a few hours. In the end, I came to work. I had to talk myself into it, but it was what I needed to do. I needed to act like nothing was wrong because if I didn’t, there would be questions. Everyone would want to know where I was and why I didn’t come in and besides, I thought work would be a welcome distraction. I was wrong.
“She jumped,” Bridget says. “From a pedestrian bridge.”
My breath hitches. It’s all anyone is talking about, the woman who dropped over twenty feet from a bridge and just nominally survived. “I know. I did hear that. How awful. What’s her name?”
“Caitlin,” she says, and I muse over the name, becoming accustomed to it.
“Caitlin what?”
“Beckett. Caitlin Beckett.”
Bridget speaks then as if giving me the change of shift report, though she’s not my patient and it’s not a shift change. She says that the patient is thirty-two years old, that she came to our ICU from surgery, though she arrived at the hospital through the emergency room before having a decompressive craniectomy for cerebral edema caused by a traumatic brain injury. In other words, swelling around the brain was putting pressure on the brain. They had to relieve that or she would be dead by now.
Bridget goes on, saying more. At some point, I stop listening because I can’t take my eyes off this woman. Caitlin Beckett. My mind gets trapped on the fact that she’s only thirty-two. It’s so young. I shake my head, feeling really appalled when I think about it. I am forty. The age difference is considerable, though when I was thirty-two, I was just coming into my own. At the time, I thought it was one of the best years of my life. I was married, with a child. I had more confidence than I’d ever had in my whole life. I knew who I was and I didn’t have to worry about trying to impress people anymore.
Caitlin lies in an ordinary hospital gown—starch white with stars on it—beneath a blanket, her arms placed unnaturally at her sides. I feel sick inside, though I’ve seen everything there is to see working as an ICU nurse. This patient shouldn’t upset me any more than every other patient, but she does, for different reasons.
“Do you think she will make it?” I ask Bridget.
“Who knows,” she says, looking around to make sure we’re alone before she does. Hope is paramount to being a nurse. As nurses, we should believe that all our patients will live, though the survival rate for someone like this is generally poor. Most don’t survive. Even if she was to survive, the odds of her having a good quality of life are not great.
“Is her family here?” I ask, putting stock in the likelihood that she will either die or come out of the coma as a shell of her former self.
“Not yet. They’re still trying to find a next of kin.”
I stare through the glass wall at her face. She looks peaceful, sleeping. She isn’t. The bed she lies on is angled upward, so that her head and upper body are inclined. Beneath the gauze, her hair, at least some of it, would have been shaved in preparation for the craniectomy. I imagine her bald. Her lips form around the endotracheal tube, which keeps the airways open so that air from the ventilator can get into her lungs. Her coloring is off. It’s waxy and wan where it isn’t bruised purple. Her injuries look horrific. A fractured hip, a broken leg, broken arms and ribs, more.
Bridget asks, “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
I frown. “How can you tell?” She’s unrecognizable. It’s impossible for Bridget to know what she looks like with the swelling, the bruising and the gauze.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I just can. It’s terrible what happened.”
I swallow. It takes effort because my saliva is thick and ropy. “Tragic.”
“What makes a person do something like that?” Bridget asks, and I can’t believe she’s going on like this, to me of all people. But she doesn’t know my story. She doesn’t know what happened before. She doesn’t know how much this upsets me.
When I don’t answer fast enough, she says, “You know, jump from a bridge, kill themselves?”
I shudder at the thought, shaking my head. I feel her eyes on my face, searching it, and feel my cheeks and ears go red. “I don’t know.”
“Of all the ways to go, why that?” Bridget asks. I wish she would drop it, but she doesn’t. She goes on, driving the point home, saying in a low voice so that no one passing by in the hall can hear, “What about carbon monoxide or a lethal dose of morphine? Wouldn’t that be easier, less painful?”
She isn’t trying to be insensitive. Not everyone knows my family’s history with suicide.
I blanch. I say nothing because I don’t have an answer and because I can’t stop thinking about what it would have been like for her to fall, to slam into the earth from the height of the bridge. There is a metallic tang in my mouth all of a sudden. I press my fingers to my lips, willing it away. I can’t stop wondering things like if she lost consciousness during the fall or if she was wide-awake when she hit the ground. Did she feel her stomach float up into her chest, her organs moving freely around her insides like on an amusement park ride, or did she feel nothing but the searing pain of impact?
Bridget excuses herself. She slips back through the sliding glass door to attend to the patient. For a minute longer, I stand there watching as Bridget shows something like affection in the way she rearranges the other woman’s hands on her abdomen, setting her fingers just so, letting her own hand linger on hers. I read her lips as she leans over her and asks, “What did you do, baby girl? What did you do?”
I can think only one thing in that moment: It’s a wonder she survived this long.
Two
My shift ends at seven. I leave the hospital that night, heading east down Wellington for Halsted, trying to leave patients behind, to not take thoughts of them with me when I go. It’s easier said than done. No matter how hard I try, some still come with me. As nurses, we’re supposed to compartmentalize, to be detached, to mentally separate our professional lives from our personal lives, like sorting medication into a pill sorter, clearly divided with thick plastic tabs. We were taught this in nursing school, though it’s not that easy and it’s not something that can be taught—to care for and about our patients, but to not let ourselves get emotionally attached because attachment, they say, leads to burnout, which causes nurses to leave an already hemorrhaging profession. It’s hard because as nurses, it’s in our nature to be compassionate, and these two things—detachment and compassion—are at odds with one another.
The sun set hours ago. This time of year, night comes early and fast. On the days that I work, I hardly ever get to see the sun. It’s dark when I leave for work in the morning and it’s dark when I go home.
