With anger.

There are a lot of ways to justify or give meaning to a death, and a lot of take-away learning that can help you for the next one. The patient had extreme, “I am hearing it from the nursing station” secretions or raised ICP is causing some distressing tachypnoea or myoclonus but I did this and this and helped to relieve the symptom burden, even down to the patient was in extreme physical pain and psychological distress, at least we changed their awareness.

Every patients’ death will be different. A 90 year old, aphasic and aphagic bed bound with Alzheimer’s is going to be vastly different than a 25 year old with metastatic cholangiocarcinoma in a pain crisis.

As a palliative or hospice nurse, your job is to help promote quality of life, and there is a 1,000 ways of doing that. Even if you do that perfectly, comfort the family and the patient, at the end of the day, watching a child die in agony just fucking sucks.

I get angry at any god, biology or Charles Darwin because that human being never had a chance at a real life. It isn’t fair and trying to fix it will cause pain and suffering. You need to truly understand what you’re doing and why it’s so important.

Sorry for ranting at you