For the past several years while writing these blogs, I have intentionally not mentioned the anniversary of Brandon’s death. It’s not because I don’t still think about it, or remember many of the things from that terrible day. My sister called to say they were helicoptering him to the hospital. An ambulance drive from where they were would’ve taken somewhere around 45 minutes. She’d ridden with Brandon’s dad to the hospital.

I was working on a class. Josh was in the room and I told him Liz had called and asked for prayers. We prayed immediately. After what seemed like a period of waiting, she called back with the unfathomable words, “Brandon died.” I wept on and off throughout the night and do not remember at all if I slept. Before going to bed I’d been on the phone with my family. Most of them were up in Iowa while we were still in St. Louis.

I remember thinking in the early hours, when the tears were so fierce I didn’t know what to do with them, that “This right here is what Jesus came for”. It did not bring me comfort but it was a moment that clicked, when something true became more real. Josh was in the middle of a summer class too, and contacted his professor early the next morning to let him know what had happened. I always meant to write that professor a thank-you note for being so understanding but I never got back around to doing it.

So you compare days like that, with the day like today that I had at work, which also made me cry, though not nearly as much, and which I would equally and genuinely term the day as “very bad”, or “terrible” or “awful” or “horrendous”, I don’t mean the same things but it still was bad. I can’t even describe it, because to do so would violate the privacy codes. But it was one of those days where the flow was constant, where I could not complete a task before being faced with the next one.

And somewhere in all this I realized I’d missed a medication. And it was too late to give it. Again it was nothing catastrophic, but it was still a med error and I still reported it. And since I do not work that often, and because that makes two med errors now in a relatively close together period of time, that doesn’t look good. They really are just stupid mistakes, and I can’t even say I wasn’t doing my best. It just happened.

So they wrote me up, and for whatever reason, handed me the paperwork that skipped over the first degree warning, then second degree warning, but jumped instead to the final warning. One more mistake and that leads to termination. No one had said anything to me, but the only reason I can think that they would be this harsh is because while all of this is going on, the facility has been being investigated by public health.

And we’ve all been interviewed, the people who were working within that 48 hours. I haven’t written yet anything about this. But in this case I can see where I didn’t do fully what it was I should’ve done. So I was a major contributor, not in the actual incident itself (an injury), but in the follow-up process that was delayed too long and now the facility is facing consequences. They have to take action. I don’t know surely but that’s my guess.

I don’t know where this puts me now. Maybe somewhere in today’s chaos I made another mistake that they’ll find and then mercifully let me go tomorrow. But the day was still horrible, and I’m not sure now if I can bring myself to go back. If I am that much of a liability, or even a potential danger to patient safety, I’m not sure I can handle that pressure. I’m not sure how a person can indefinitely go without making a mistake.

So this is kind of tragic for me, and I’m a little bit heartbroken. I do not have the mindset, nor the desire, to even conceive that perfection is possible. I had kind of hoped to work here for the next however many years, and in that time I would build up my skills both lost ones and new ones. It was the perfect place where I could go and make money for all of these college kids and continued years of paying tuition.

But anyway. I’ll pray about it. Sometimes though you can’t even pray, it’s like you know that God doesn’t need you to talk, and that’s he’s okay waiting until whenever the words come back again. Suddenly working in the kitchen seems lovely, and no one would ever even have to know I was a nurse. For the ones who did I don’t know what I’d tell them, but that would come too. And the feeble true knowing this too shall pass.