The Wandering Nightingale

Over a month ago, a bunch of us got together with the counselling team and talked about our horrid event (P.S. read last post ). You would think that these people - Senior Consultants, Critical Care Outreach Practitioners, Clinical Nurse Specialists - would've been more of an expert in handling or even processing their grief by now. What with all those years of experience under their belts. I could not be more wrong. What I witnessed that day - raw grief and pain - even from the most senior member in the team, was eye-opening. Despite the fact that some of them only came into contact with her in the beginning or in the midst of her resuscitation, there is still pain. Pain for the poor girl, pain for the family. Pain for a loss, OUR loss. Even if it wasn't personal, it became almost personal. It was still a loss. I have never attended a counselling session before. The counselling lady kept saying, "this is a unique, traumatic event". Over and over, I hear ...

Once I was 7 years old... I never thought I'd be a nurse. I wanted to become many things - but being a nurse wasn't one of them. But here we are - 7 years of being a fully qualified registered nurse.  10 years since taking those baby steps in nursing school. I couldn't be more proud of myself. And I certainly could not be happier to have come this far. But this week has been especially hard. I watched Death walked out the door with a 16 year old. I remember a lot of things on that day. I remember her parents panicking as they watched their baby girl go into respiratory distress. I remember the calm, soothing tones of our voices that do not match our body language - our eyes and hands working furiously fast to manage that moment. I remember the flurry of things that happened after as the cardiac arrest team came crashing into the room, I remember the exact time of when we started chest compression, I remember doing those chest compression on her, I remember the ex...

Just discovered my blog no longer exists in the world wide web (due to neglect, I must say) and I somehow found enough strength and courage in me to terminate the account on the hosting site (because CLEARLY it wasn’t hosting it at all at this point). I don’t know how I feel. A bit of loss, I imagine. All those years of writing. And memories. The end of an era. I can’t even trace the old bits. I did however find the very first makings of my blog (which is still up, surprisingly - whoever said free hosting ain’t great?) and it amazes me to realise the last entry on it was dated all the way back in 2008. Wow. #10yearschallenge indeed, you don’t say. I still get fleeting memories of my blog. Some writings. I am pretty sure there is a a way to extract those writings, there was an app I used to write all these blog posts - I must find it again. I went back to Tumblr - but I didn’t know what I was looking for. Was I looking for another (cyber) space, to regurgitate my thoug...