Death used to terrify me. I won’t say phobia-worthy, but enough to keep a kid up at night. When I was little, I had an irrational fear of dying. I was scared it would hurt, that I’d miss out on so much, and that my family would be so sad. Then the fear moved to being afraid my family members would die and how much I’d miss them. To this day, I do not know what triggered that fear. I obviously outgrew it and never thought much of it again.
How surprised 6-7-year-old Brianna would be to know her future self would beg for death to come. How she prayed death would find her, and when it did, how easily she welcomed it. How surprised she would be to know how warm, safe, and peaceful dying can be. How death could actually be the savior and not the monster in someone’s story.
How death would be the savior in hers, even if only momentarily.
I worked in an ER where we worked hard daily to save and preserve life at all costs, never once thinking of the patient’s journey to get to the ER. What they had to endure before arriving to us, if they too prayed for death to find them after being in torturous situations, and here we were adding more pain.
Because saving a life isn’t peaceful; it’s not warm or comforting. It involves violent chest compressions to keep your blood pumping. Metal scopes are shoved in your mouth and down your throat, only to further shove more tubes down your throat to help you breathe. Needles, needles, and more needles for different IV access sites for different medications, fluids, blood, and if we can’t get a standard IV started, you get something called an IO (intraosseous IV), which means a bone gun is used to insert an IV straight into one of your bones (because remember, bones are vascular). Catheters are inserted, you are electrocuted to fix your heart rhythm, and the pressure it takes to put on arterial bleeds can’t be comfortable. The act of saving a life is beautiful; the process, however, is not. It is organized chaos.
As a healthcare provider, I know how easy it can be to see a patient, not a person. To get into the zone and forget I am saving a person’s life, not a patient. That we don’t always think to talk to the person on the gurney, to offer words of comfort, especially if we think they are unresponsive. Knowing now, I will never do that again. Knowing now, unresponsive on the outside doesn’t mean unresponsive on the inside.
I looked up at the sky, warm and at peace. At peace because death had finally found me. A once terrifying thought, now a mercy, because finally the pain was gone. I used to think dying would hurt or be scary, but it was warm and comfortable, like a hug, and the view of that same familiar blue sky was so inviting. Almost as if to welcome me, knowing I’d have an amazing group of loved ones waiting for me there. I faintly heard one of the paramedics yelling, “She’s out!” when she realized I was no longer responsive. Then everything went dark.
That once blue sky now faded to black, only momentarily, or so it felt, before I opened my eyes again to that same paramedic firmly sternal rubbing me while telling me, “KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN, BRIANNA, YOU NEED TO STAY AWAKE!” I only knew she was sternal rubbing me because of the repeated pressure I would feel up by my collar bones on the upward strokes of her fist. Anything lower, I could no longer feel.
They ran me towards the ambulance; once inside, they worked quickly to get IV access. They began cutting my clothes off. True to Brianna fashion, I tried to diffuse the panic with my humor as I said, “Cover up my raisins, I don’t want them on the news.” Once they got my shirt open, I heard it: “Get the pelvic binder, she’s bruised across her abdomen and it’s firm!” Reiterating that I likely broke my pelvis and was internally bleeding. (a pelvic binder is used to stabilize pelvic fractures).
That’s when I regained feeling, but not how you think. I felt that unbearable pain again, only now I no longer knew where it stemmed from. I was angry now. Angry that they took me from what I assumed was death’s hands, as that was the only peace I had known through the whole ordeal.
Everything hurt, but I couldn’t move, and the attempts made felt like those limbs had the most intense shock waves pass through them. Then I heard the monitor’s bells and alarms going off the second they got the leads on me, I knew my vitals were unstable.
To this day, I feel immense guilt for saying, “The paramedics were rude; they weren’t answering my questions” because I told them I was a nurse, to tell me what my vitals were, and what they were seeing, and no one was talking to me. They just put a high-flow O2 mask on me and said, “STARS has to land now! She’s too unstable to get to the hospital.” For reference, the closest ER was 5 minutes away.
Here I am thinking STARS?! (STARS is our air ambulance service), a dramatic call considering I was lucid and talking… or so I thought.
I found out after reading EMS reports that I had long periods of “being unresponsive.” So they weren’t rude, I just wasn’t actually talking, not out loud at least. I remember reading the reports astonished, how aware I was of all that was happening around me, yet deemed“unresponsive.”
I remember hearing the THUD THUD THUD as the helicopter approached, and then nothing. There is a period of time here where I don’t remember what was happening. I do, however, remember the moment STARS medics got to the back of the ambulance, and I heard them say, “We’ll take it from here.”
They worked so fast and seamlessly together, like a well-oiled machine, and I will never forget Jenny. She was the first person besides John to talk to me like a person. I remember hearing, “Hello Brianna, my name is Jenny,” and she introduced herself and the team (though unfortunately, I do not remember their names) and said that they were taking me to the hospital and it would take approximately 10 minutes. The hospital that was 5 minutes away was a small rural hospital, not equipped for traumas like this, so they were transporting me to the city.
They were telling me all this while working and moving me to the helicopter. I remember the jolt of pain the moment they started moving the gurney. I was lucid here, talking to Jenny, telling her how much pain I was in, and she told me she would give me more for the pain. At this point, the morphine administered earlier wasn’t working, so STARS started fentanyl. Only it wasn’t working much either.
It’s hard to explain feeling the pain but not feeling my body, well not really anyway. It was heavy and impossible to move, every attempt feeding more of those shock waves down that limb. Everything was compounded; now I literally couldn’t pinpoint where the pain was coming from, it was torture. Actual torture.
I could hear the medic at my head discussing administering tranexamic acid, a medication used to slow bleeding. My vitals were all over the place, from fast heart rate to slow, blood pressure in the shits to it being far higher than it should be. Knowing now it’s because my autonomic system was fighting for its life as the swelling in my spine began to crush my spinal cord starting at C2.
The good news was that on portable ultrasound, my liver and spleen were intact! They saw free fluid in my abdomen but not like what they were expecting, which was also soothing to hear. What wasn’t soothing was Jenny telling me I had been maxed out on pain meds. I maxed out on fentanyl and morphine in a 10-minute ride and was still in dire pain.
After this, there were lapses in my memory on the way to the hospital, because once again, I was unresponsive during those times. Not sure if I was unresponsive due to injuries and shock or from all the pain meds since up until that point in my life, I was a Tylenol or Advil-only girlie.
I do remember arriving at the hospital because once again, I stared up at that blue sky as they rushed me toward the elevator off the roof.
Finally, I thought, surely this is where the pain ends. Thinking the worst of it was finally over now, the trauma was done!
Except it was only the beginning.
