Life and Death on a Thursday

I work as a diet assistant at a Level II Trauma Center hospital. Our website states that “Trauma Centers provide the level of care that can make the difference between life and death.” Working in a small office off of the kitchen, however, I’m not often confronted with matters of Life and Death. A typical day on the job consists of communicating to the cooks and cold production staff what food needs to be prepared, checking for accuracy of patients’ meals, taking orders for new patients’ meal trays/special requests, and just generally making sure everyone gets fed. The only patients I typically interact with are those who are coherent enough to tell me their food preferences.

But every so often, I have a not-so-typical day at work. On this particular Thursday my coworker and I went upstairs to the NICU to meet with one of the dietitians about a new position opening up. In my two and a half years on the job, this was my first time ever stepping foot in the NICU. We got the grand tour and were stunned by how many tiny babies were being cared for here. When I got back down to the office I checked the messages on the phone, back to business as usual. One of the messages was a request from an ICU nurse for a comfort care tray. These are trays that we provide to the family members of patients who are dying. They consist of coffee, tea, chips, and cookies. One of the food service workers typically delivers trays to the ICU, however she had gone home early and I had agreed to deliver any late trays. My coworker assembled the tray and then I set off to deliver it. I wheeled my cart into the elevator, up to the 2nd floor, and across to the opposite side of the hospital. When I reached the ICU, I pressed the button that opens the doors and stood back as one opened towards me and one opened away. As the doors parted, I didn’t need to look at the room numbers to know where I was going. Immediately in front of me I saw strangers breaking down in familiar sobs. In their faces I saw my own, and those of my dad, mom, sister, aunt, and uncle. How many times had we looked like that earlier this year, standing around my grandma’s bedside waiting for the end but wishing it didn’t have to come? Stunned, and suddenly acutely aware of how noisy my cart was, I moved as slowly and quietly as possible to the nurses’ station. I didn’t want to disturb the grieving family, and I was suddenly embarrassed to draw attention to the meager offerings on the tray in front of me. How can a few cookies and a carafe of coffee make up for the loss of a loved one? They can’t. I somewhat reluctantly handed the tray to a nurse sitting outside the room, and left to deliver the next tray.

It wasn’t until later that night that it occurred to me that I had just witnessed the full circle of life within about a 30 minute time span. In that short amount of time I had gone from seeing all the brand new life in the NICU, to the end of a person’s life in the ICU. This realization rocked me. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that these things happened in the hospital. People are born, and people die, every single day. One of my coworkers pointed out earlier this year that when we get notifications of patients being discharged, that they might have passed away. I haven’t looked at those discharge faxes the same since. And while those of us down in the nutrition department may not be doing hands-on patient care, we get to know a lot of our patients. We know what they like to eat and drink, and we notice when they get discharged or re-admitted. My brush with Life and Death that Thursday hit me with a heavy dose of perspective that reminded me not to take my health or any single day alive for granted. And it reminded me that although I sometimes feel like a cog in a machine performing the same tasks day in and day out, that those tasks matter. They matter to the parents of the babies in the NICU, to the everyday patients, and even to the families of the Dying. I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility to the Living. Because life is short and unpredictable, but food is comforting and constant. And on a person’s worst days, the least I can do is offer them nourishment.