Lessons Learned in the ICU

How to make this not too heavy. My 28 year old nephew has been in the hospital for two months with a brain injury due to lack of oxygen to his brain when he overdosed on drugs. It is a severe brain injury. He is getting better slowly. But there were three weeks in the ICU when I was there almost everyday, sometimes for 10 hours watching and waiting.

I learned about slowing life down. There is nothing as slow as waiting in the ICU. Time goes by and you do nothing, but you are present. There were the smallest changes each day to see. Sometimes things looked a little better and sometimes they looked a little worse. Time was carved out of my days and my life that I didn’t know I had. I was able to take about a week off of work and then find many hours in almost every day over the next few weeks to go to the ICU. I stopped being “productive” and stopped “doing” and started just “being.”

I learned about being there for the people you love. I was afraid on many days at first about how to be there. Was I going to be comforting a Mother who would lose her only child? I wanted to be there even for the worst and I held myself together for my nephew’s Mother so that she could lean on me. By the grace of God I didn’t have to go through that THIS time, but there will be a time for all of us to step up and be there for the worst. Many of us have already gone through it before. An unexpected gift was that many family relationships were improved or even healed during those long days. So many family members would come and go, and we would spend the long hours talking and getting to know each other in new ways. We admired each other for stepping up in a big way and being there.

I learned about having no power and no ability to change or fix the situation. I had no control at all. It was so apparent that I felt it very deeply. For many long weeks my nephew was in a vegetative state and knew nothing of his surroundings. There was nothing the doctors could do. It was out of all of our hands. It was wait and see. It was praying for a miracle. I learned about faith and hope against fear. It is a good reminder that so much of life is out of our control. I was working on being willing to accept whatever happened, but while there was still life, I didn’t give up hope. Two months later my nephew is still in the hospital. He is understanding and talking slowly, but his body is not working great yet. He still has a long road of recovery ahead of him. That brings me back to my first lesson: slowing life down. It will be a long road, but I’ve got the time.