ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 128
increased, the drugs were changed, the dosages were dropped. One day I
noticed on my rounds that an oxygen mask had been clamped securely under
his large grey eyes, and as the family was allotted much less visiting time I
was placed in the increasingly uncomfortable position ofhaving to talk andworse-listen to them. I slowly came to know Jason, and the discomfort grew
as I realized I couldn't avoid eye contact with him when I delivered drugs to
his room. I began to think about him on my long drive home, the thoughts
tinged with outrage: while other kids were out chasing baseballs and
fighting with their sisters, Jason was running out of breath and fighting for
his life.
The hospital environment was forcing me to consider the laws of cause
and effect. The effect was obvious: Jason was dying. The cause? I began to
focus on my small part; I really hadn't washed my hands all that well or
gotten far enough into the hood when making his piggybacks. I thought I
might have touched a needle to the side of a drug vial before inserting it,
thereby contaminating the whole piggy-back. I had gotten so mechanical I
no longer "saw" what I was doing and may have injected possibly too little or
too much of the various prescriptions. Did I swab everything with alcohol
before starting? Sort of.
As I began to pay earnest attention to the manner in which I worked,
Jason went from occassional skirmishes with intramuscular insulin injections to a full scale war of constant intravenous insulin drips. He developed
numerous decubitus-bedsores-and for all the warnings about maintaining objectivity and professional detachment I could not help cringing when
I heard his screaming at night as the nurse cleaned and treated each ulcer.
I knew in my soul that eventually the transfer sheet would come through
reading: "McKenney, Jason, D/C: Expired."
I redoubled my efforts at sterility when making piggybacks, swabbing
everything three and four times, washing my hands twice or three times,
paying intense attention to the drug and dose ordered and to exactly what
I was injecting into each little bag of solution. I drew an imaginary line threefourths of the way into the hood where I would place my drugs and supplies,
a line that would assure a constant, unbroken flow of purified air over each
vial and syringe. As I concentrated more on providing the cleanest possible
environment, I noticed with great satisfaction the gradual decrease of ABX
(antibiotic) doses and finally, the order: "Discountinue: ABX."
On the eighth of December, free of the oxygen mask and free of the
antibiotic piggybacks, Jason began the slow period of weaning from the pain
and anxiety killers, receiving milligrams less of each narcotic dose every
twenty-four hours. When returning from the Surgical Intensive Care Unit
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