Fight Against Death

ICU days....

1. During morning rounds in ICU I got a new young international 22 years old female patient who came to ICU in night from ward. She underwent bone marrow transplant few days back but due to severe sepsis, she was sick and due to low BP she was on multiple medicines to increase BP.

Due to worsening of her condition we put her on ventilator but her condition keep on deteriorating. With time her urine output stopped and due to high potassium and acid in blood, we put her on dialysis.

In between all these events I was continuously talking to interpreter so that he can explain the ongoing events to the pts family as due to international patient, me and patient parent's had a language barrier. Even i could not understand her parents language i could still feel the pain through their eyes...Theirs eyes were speaking everything what they were going through...They were realizing that they r loosing their young daughter, i too was feeling the same but i wanted to try to save her till last breath of her. But whenever i see her parents eyes, i could feel how helpless i was, i could feel their pain of loosing her on a foreign land where no one is there to share their pain of loosing a young daughter of them.

At last fighting for 8 hours, we lost her. We tried our level best but could not won against the god's will.

Now the time came when I had to declare her death to her family.For me after working more than 4 years in ICU I still find difficult to declare a death. Every time I have to do so, I feel that I have lost someone nearer to me. I always try to be strong while declaring a death, but every time I feel I want to be alone and cry as if I have lost someone dearer...

I don't know other doctors too feel the same while declaring the death or others are strong enough to overcome their emotions, as we all knw and said that we shd not be much affectionate to a person whome we r treating as we willfind difficult to treat our loved ones who r sick at some point of time.

I really don't know the answer of this but what I realized is that, its very easy to say to relatives of the sick patient we need to this and that to your patient, but when the patient is our loved ones and the same things need to be done to them.... Are we strong that time as we expect the relatives to be....Answer is NO...

I dont knw this feeling is my weakness or strength but this feeling makes me to fight for them till their last breath...