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Death can't be the end
nursingaround
 November 02 2024 at 05:08 pm
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I just watched a man die today and it can't be for nothing. There is nothing worse than watching someone in pain, even though we're all in pain to some degree or another, but nearly everyone in my town is a chain smoking alcoholic with a decent dose of hard drugs thrown in to spice things up. If you think I'm exaggerating just come and work in any outback Australian mining town and you will see how people reap what they've sown for decades. Mr Riley was brought to my hospital one week earlier because he was finding it hard to breathe but there was not much we could do for lungs at the final stage of total failure and a heart that struggled to pump blood around the body and kidneys equally bad. It was a miracle he had made it to sixty, but his time had come. 'How about some morphine' I recommended but the patient shook his head and in between his laboured breaths, told me he was worried it might be bad for him. Such irony is easy to see but hard to put into words, but after a lifetime of abusing his body to the extreme, he was suddenly worried about one of the few remaining medicines to make him breathe a little easier. But I know better, because when you mention morphine, people suddenly see how close to the end they really are. Fortunately I'd gotten to know Mr Riley over the multiple presentations over the last year and he listened to me and trusted me when I told him it would not harm him, but help him. It's odd to think that a high dose of morphine will stop us breathing, but a small dose will help your breathing, and over the next week Mr Riley spent with us in the small hospital he agreed to try the morphine and his breathing did ease even as his body slowly shut down. Like so many in our town Mr Riley didn't have any family to be with him during his dying days and like many who passed before him I wondered if it was because he had come here to escape from his past, or left his family or they left him, but when his final moments came I felt it couldn't be for nothing. Sadly in the 12 months I've been working outback I've seen more people die than in the last 30 years nursing combined, and it can't be for nothing. I'm not afraid to admit I need God to be real. All this death, or maybe the fact I'm about to turn 50, has made me need not just any God, but the God that entered into this world of suffering and suffered with us. I need God to be real, but I also need God to know what I'm going through - and it turns out my God, the Christian God, did just that. My own irony is that while I need God to be real (and despite bouts of doubt) I'm not an especially good Christian, but that's a story for another time. For now, I'll finish by asking who else needs God and at the same time fails to live up to their own idea of a good Christian? For my thoughts condemn well and truly, let alone speak of my deeds.

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