Ineffectual in the Face of Grief

I was there on an awful morning and watched as young parents were given heartbreaking news.  I was there and so ineffectual.  I blamed it on my youth, but I wonder if I would be any more helpful now.  What does anyone do or say faced with overwhelming despair?

In the spring of 1965, I spent three months at Children’s Memorial Hospital on Chicago’s north side.  The hospital, which was a very large complex occupying a triangular block, apparently closed in 2012.  It is hard to imagine a site where so much of significance happened in so many lives, as going out of existence.

I was in my senior year of nursing school, and this three-month stint was my pediatric nursing education.  We attended classes, but we also worked in the hospital nearly every day.  We had a variety of experiences as we worked days, evenings and nights.  There was even one toddler unit where a student was in charge on the night shift.  But, something we were not supposed to do was work in the Intensive Care Unit.  The truth, however, was that when the ICU was short-staffed, they sometimes called one of the other units and requested that a student be sent up to help.  This had to be a student perceived as being able to cope with what went on in the ICU.  The student would not be assigned to the patients requiring the most technical care…I only saw the babies who had had open heart surgery through the plate glass windows of their room.  But, I was pulled to the ICU three times. I know I was viewed as a cracker-jack, but it was easy to get in over one’s head there.

On the day of this particular agony, I was assigned to a toddler girl who was in continuous convulsions.  She lived with her parents in a Chicago tenement which was sufficiently deteriorated to afford her a supply of plaster and paint chips to eat.  The lead content of these materials had caused immense neurological damage.  Her physical care was keeping me very occupied.  I don’t remember the details now other than the jerking motions racking her poor little body with no let-up, in spite of medications and a cooling mattress.

A young doctor, a resident, I suppose, came in to talk with the parents.  He did not sit them down and approach his topic gently.  While standing in a crowded space between the bed and the window, he unceremoniously delivered the information that their child would either die or be a vegetable.  There was no possibility of recovery.

The young couple sobbed and clung to each other. 

I was in up to my eyeballs with the physical care of the child, but I wonder now, if I was using that as an excuse.  I had no idea what to say or how to say it.  I was barely twenty years old myself.  How was I to cope when confronted with this raw wound torn in their souls?

I don’t remember what happened afterward.  I think the parents left….probably to seek the comfort and consolation of support from the wider family.  The child and I both survived the eight hour shift.

I have thought of this many times over the years.  Especially, when I owned an apartment rented to a young couple with a toddler.  Unknown to me was the fact that the child had an elevated blood lead level when they moved in.  It dropped during the first six months they lived in my apartment which was lovely and had no chipped paint or loose plaster.  I found out when it sky-rocketed during the second six months.  It was reported, and a state inspector came in.  Even though the level had initially dropped and the inspector could find no deterioration of concern, the assumption was that my apartment was somehow at fault.  Before I could legally rent the apartment again, I was made to do thousands of dollars of work which was basically unnecessary.  When I protested, I was lectured on the horrors of lead poisoning.

Believe me, I was much clearer on the horrors of lead poisoning than the state inspector was.  She had never cared for a child convulsing.  She had never felt helpless in the presence of overwhelming grief.