Restive State

If I could be a supervillian...

Your results:
You are Mr. Freeze

Mr. Freeze 68% The Joker 57% Magneto 57% Dr. Doom 56% Apocalypse 55% Juggernaut 53% Lex Luthor 48% Venom 43% Green Goblin 41% Dark Phoenix 40% Poison Ivy 40% Catwoman 36% Kingpin 30% Riddler 29% Two-Face 21% Mystique 17%

You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally.

So yes, it is a new name. Same old thing, just a newer, better name.
Now for the writing...

No two courses in the hospital are the same. Cliche? Yes, but true. I had a pair of patients lately that showed that to me in such contrast that it became extremely clear, like the first light of the sun as it peeks over the clouds. It stuns you to think that even with throwing all the modern machinery of medicine at the two folks, two very different things happened.

Yes, their presentation were different. But they came to the hospital for the same reason: to get better. The first, Mrs. A, was older, and suffering from medical maladies. Things like acute respiratory and renal failure, with a side of diabetes thrown in to make the situation interesting. Mrs. B, was past the average for her gender, but she was already gone when she arrived. Severe and unrelenting dementia left her unable to process or live in the world she once knew. Placed by her family with the diagnosis of "failure to thrive", she was here to pass on. Mrs. A however, looked like she might go first. She was clutched by the hand of delirium, not dementia, brought on by the failings of her kidneys. In my book she was the odds on winner to go first.

I first met Mrs. A helping out a fellow nurse with her care. Sometimes you need more than one set of hands to clean someone up and get them settled for the night. She looked at me with uncomprehending eyes and passively let us go about our business. Fast forward 2 weeks. I walked in to her room that night and was met by a completely different person. After introducing myself she asked, "Have we met before?" I replied that we had, but a little while ago. To which she said, "A lot of you have said that, I sit here and wonder how I managed to lose a month and I'm still trying to piece together what happened to get me here." In no way was she the passive somnolent patient I remember. We had healed her. Between dialysis and other treatments, she had emerged from the delirium that had ruled her life in the hospital and emerged into a world where she had lost a month of her life, but was still alive to start piecing together what her life had become.. She was going home, just as soon as the necessary arrangements were made.

Fast forward a couple more weeks, to Mrs. B. She lay there, calling out to the TV when she wasn't playing with her own feces or sleeping. She wore me out, on more than just a physical level. She wouldn't eat, spat everything back in our faces. On occasion, she would have a moment of lucidity, talk a little clearer to us, even get excited when we told her we had applesauce for her. But then just as she would drop into lucidity, she would fade away into the shell of the person she once was, motivated only by the barest of primitive instincts that were still accessible in her mind. She was here to get better. We did what we could, trying every trick in the book to get her to eat. Trying medications to bring peace to her short-wired brain and get more moments of lucidity and clarity. Short of heroic measures like TPN or a feeding tube, which she would have torn out, there was nothing left to do. Modern medicine had failed her, succumbing to the pressures of advanced severe dementia. The last night I had with her, the night I learned Mrs. A was going home, I thought Mrs.B was not going to make it through the night. Early evening lucidity with her daughters had given way to the restlessness and thrashing of someone fighting the inevitable. Somehow she managed to stay alive through the night. You do what you can for folks like her, knowing it is not enough and hoping that just your presence next to them is comfort for them, a kind stranger in a strange world. I don't know what happened to Mrs. B, I 've had a bunch of days off since I last saw her. Hopefully she left our institution and was able to spend the rest of her days with her fairly large family. We didn't heal her. In a way, we gave up. In the face of overwhelming odds we counted our chances and said "enough is enough." But in another way, I think we healed her. If nothing, I look at the last evening I had her, seeing her lucid and normal with her family as the chance to be with them, in a normal way, before the inevitable arrived.
Two different course, two different outcomes, each heading towards the inevitable, one path branched towards healing, the other towards release.

'Til later...