why I hate my job sometimes

The truth is, I will go home tonight, throw my scrubs in the hamper, change, hugs my boys, laugh at some mediocre sitcom, and never again have a thought of you enter my head.

To be physically incapacitated, fed through a tube, tied to a hospital bed for your own safety, to have years of poor care and rough living seep their yellow tell-tale mark over the whites of your eyes, the very skin of you tired and heaving and helpless.... this I will not dwell on. I am a nurse, but there are things even medicine can't fix. Some things medicine shouldn't try to fix, shouldn't try to prolong. So, I will fuss over the timing of medications, replace electrolytes and call the doctor when a critical calcium threatens to throw the whole precarious balance over the cliff's edge your body is hanging onto, but I will not cry for this. You were once somebody who knew themselves, and I refuse to see this reduction as my chance to play savior.

You will not remember my hand in yours, an gesture I can't help, even given what I know. That this will kill you. That this is killing you. And that it never should have been this that killed you.

You are 52, younger than my mother. Thirty years plus into my future. And the truth is, I can't forget you, but not because I ever knew you., but only because, some time in the future, I know my memory will bring you up, and I will relay to a younger, greener nurse what hepatic encephalopathy looks like.