Tag Archives: death

Danni and Sarah

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(I first wrote this 25 years ago. Perspective changes with time.)

I worked for a staff model HMO for nine years. Despite being a small cog in a sizeable organization, our Ob/Gyn department was like a second family to most of us. We knew about most of each other’s spouses (or ex-husbands). We shared our young kids’ accomplishments, antics and disappointments. We celebrated birthdays, expressed our condolences at the passing of elderly parents, and grieved together when a beloved young mother-to-be died in car crash. We had monthly department meetings at local restaurants after office hours, instead of trying to cram an agenda into a lunch hour.

Danni was the RN OB Intake Coordinator for our group. She was a gregarious soul with a kind heart and a good sense of humor.  She spent an hour with each new mother-to-be at their first OB visit, talking about what to expect during pregnancy, what to do (eat healthy, wear a seatbelt and keep your appointments) what not to do (smoke, drink, anything blatantly stupid or dangerous). She was usually smiling, even when one of her appointments sorely tried her patience.

If she was having a particularly stressful day I would go to her office and wrap my arms around her. She said I gave great hugs; this was back when it wouldn’t trigger a visit from HR. I remember her colorful cable-knit sweaters under her lab coat and the warmth of her cheek against mine as she hugged me back, providing a brief respite from the day’s aggravations. Sort of like Mom telling you not to worry, that everything would be alright.

Danni suffered unrelenting physical pain from a tragic injury more than a decade earlier. We all knew about it, but to hear her talk it was more of an aggravation, something she’d learned to live with. Or maybe it was to deflect from the emotional torment she carried and of which only a few were aware.

I left the HMO in 1994; Corporate dissolved the staff model a few years later because “you cost us too much money.” Everyone found other jobs in town; Danni got a position with a local clinic. Our family had been torn asunder; we drifted apart and some connections withered from neglect.

I wandered for a couple of years, working in two different practices and a couple of locum tenens jobs before being hired to set up a practice in a small Southwestern town. I’d wanted to leave the long, gloomy Midwestern winters I’d endured for three decades and was trying to get out from under crushing but self-inflicted debt. (It hadn’t occurred to me that I was abandoning my kids as well, something I would later regret.)

In February, five months into the new practice, I flew Danni and Elizabeth, another former staff member, out to help train my nurse and receptionist. My new staff had no experience with an obstetrical practice, and I was used to someone else handling patient education. In retrospect, my support staff may not have been receptive to the intrusion but I needed the expertise.

Danni promised to send me forms and other information when she returned home. I called her several weeks later since I hadn’t received anything. She seemed distracted and vague but assured me she would “get around to it when I have time.” I should have suspected something was wrong. That was the last time I heard her voice.
One evening she sent her daughter to spend the night with the neighbor next door.
And ended her pain forever.

*           *           *

Linda, a nurse practitioner I worked with, called me early the next morning, sobbing.
“Danni is dead!”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.  She had her daughter Katie stay at her friend’s house last night. She found Dani when she came home to get ready for school.  I don’t know why, but they found a note.” 

She continued to cry.
“I remember she was suicidal when she left the clinic.  I remember telling you she could never do that to Katy and you told me ‘Don’t bet on it.’  I don’t understand.”
“I do,” I replied.  “I understand all too well.”

I talked with Peg later that day and told her what had happened.
“How are you handling all this?”
“As well as I can.”
“You know, I had a dream about you last week and I was afraid to tell you about it.  You and I were talking and you told me you were going to kill yourself in the same tone you are using now.   When I reminded you that you’d promised to keep going, you looked at me and said, ‘I was telling you what you wanted to hear.’  I heard the resignation in your voice.  How could you do that??  Don’t you realize how much it would hurt everyone, including your kids???”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t be around to know it.”

Over the next 2 days we talked about suicide; Peg was very angry.
“It’s so selfish!  I don’t understand how she could calmly take her own life and leave her child with no one. There is always something else you can do.”

But for someone who has fallen into the abyss, such platitudes ring hollow.  I know because I lived on the edge for almost 30 years and peered into the darkness many times.  There comes a point when there is no more hope; when one has reached one’s limit of coping and can go no further.  A point at which getting out of bed in the morning takes all the energy one has.  There is nothing tangible to keep one moving, to make one want to take one more breath.  Danni had reached her limit after years of constant physical pain and believing she had to go it alone.  For all the people who cared and loved her, she finally could not continue.

The love of other people isn’t enough for some of us, because we don’t feel it is genuine or that we deserve it.  On some level, I had long viewed that conditional “love” in the context of Billie Holiday’s song, God Bless the Child:

“Rich relations may give you
A crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don’t take too much.”

Ironically, Nietzsche said, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”  I survived many of those dark nights and ultimately determined I didn’t want to jump into the void.

A couple of days later I got an e-mail from Liz.
“I got your message, thank you.
I feel numb.  I can’t believe it.  I will never understand. 
Please, David, never do this!!!!!!”

*           *           *

Sarah was a 17-year old-gangbanger and troubled youth. Her father had also been a gang member, but he had turned his life around and tried to steer kids away from drugs, alcohol and living on the edge. Age and a stark reminder of mortality is often enough to trigger such an epiphany in adults, but teenagers either think they are immortal, or doomed to a life that can never change, so why bother.

Sarah was drunk the night she and some friends were playing chicken on the Interstate highway that ran north of town. They would lie on the white line while traffic approached at Autobahn speed, then run to the shoulder at the last moment.  When Sarah’s turn came, she got up too late and was struck by a car.  The local newspaper called it “an unfortunate accident” but some who knew her said she’d been severely depressed.

I went to the visitation with a family who had a troubled, angry 15-year-old daughter. I learned that when she threatened to run away from home, Sarah had talked her out it.  “You don’t know how good you have it.  You don’t ever want to live on the street!”  Her friends and acquaintances, also “gangbangers,” appeared for the visitation, crying and holding on to each other for support.

I cried the tears I hadn’t been able to shed for Danni, and for those kids who felt they only had each other.   I cried wondering why it took death to arouse family and friends from their oblivious slumber. Twenty-five years later I know some aren’t receptive to being helped, no matter how sincere the efforts.

St. Mary’s Church was filled for the funeral.  The gang members had printed T-shirts with “Turtle” (her nickname) over the left breast, and a memorial on the back: “In loving memory of Sarah Jo, 1980-1997.”   During the eulogy Sarah’s cousin told the mourners, “If you love someone, tell them now.  You never know when it will be too late.”

The procession to the cemetery stretched for 2 miles.  After the priest finished, her friends released green and white balloons and sang for her.   I couldn’t hear what they were singing. Instead, I heard a radio in the background playing “Forever Young” and then “That’s What Friends Are For.”

Melissa, 8 years old, wrote her own goodbye:

I held my 13 year old son and told him I loved him, even though I chewed his butt incessantly and tried to make him walk the straight and narrow.  He blew it off, but deep inside I knew he understood and would always know that I loved him.  I’d like to think my dad would have done the same.

A parent’s worst nightmare is having to bury a child long before his or her time. 

A child’s worst nightmare is wondering what you did to make your parent commit suicide.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255

Turtle © Can Stock Photo / shalamov

Paradise Lost

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Obstetrics isn’t always the happy specialty. Tragedy is Death claiming one life during pregnancy. Unspeakable devastation is when both mother and baby are lost.

Linda was one of the receptionists in our OB/GYN office, and a single mother with a young daughter. She had known bad relationships and even worse situations but she rarely let them cloud her demeanor. She would smile even when she was angry, fuming over the latest frustrating phone conversation with a patient who had been unreasonable, irritated or just plain stupid. Being around her would make the worst day of work just a little better.

Linda met and later married Danny, a hard-working shop rat at GM who looked like Chuck Norris and worshiped the ground she walked on. No one had ever treated her so well and her face lit up whenever she talked about him. Maybe “happily ever after” was more than just a fairy tale.

Linda was ecstatic when she became pregnant and we were thrilled. Her ultrasound revealed her six-year-old daughter was going to have a baby brother. All of the providers took care of her during her pregnancy and we were looking forward to the new arrival. Someone arranged a baby shower; it’s what you do for family.

One cold, rainy night in October, two weeks before her due date, Linda dropped off her daughter at a Brownie meeting and headed home. On her way back, a man ran a stop sign at an intersection, slamming into her car and sending it down an embankment. The impact threw Linda out of the car which then rolled over her and her unborn baby.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics could feel the baby moving inside Linda’s uterus, even as she lay unconscious, but there was nothing they could do. The hospital was at least twenty minutes away and a baby deprived of oxygen has only a few minutes to live. Even if someone had delivered the baby with a scalpel, a rainy country road is no place to resuscitate a critically ill baby. They could only watch on in horror as the movement slowed and stopped.

The hospital’s obstetrics residents were waiting in the Emergency Department when the ambulance arrived. The paramedics quickly wheeled their gurney into a room which had been set up for an emergency delivery. Tthe chief resident dutifully performed a procedure he knew was futile.

I was at home that night when the resident called.

“I’m in the ER. There is a patient of yours, here. She was in an auto accident about an hour ago. We delivered the baby down here but… I’m sorry. Neither one of them made it.”

I felt sick and more than a little helpless. At first, I didn’t know what to do. I’m used to driving like a bat out of hell to the hospital to deliver a baby that’s coming quickly, but there wasn’t anything I could do that would bring them back. After the initial shock, I called Jenny, one of the nurse practitioners who had cared for Linda throughout her pregnancy. She called Hope, one of the other receptionists and a friend of Danny’s, who in turned called the factory.

An eerie silence met me when I walked into the room. The residents had gone back to the Labor unit and the nurses had moved on to other patients. The gurney was bloody; a scalpel and the placenta lay in a stainless-steel basin. Linda and son lay side by side, as if they were sleeping peacefully after a long labor. Her abdominal incision was still open but the bleeding one would expect from a fresh Cesarean was lacking. I covered her with a clean gown and a sheet. Jenny and Hope appeared a few minutes later, their faces pale and grim.

“Someone found Danny; he was working on the line. It will take him about half an hour to get here.”

When Danny arrived someone from the front desk escorted him to the room. I excused myself to make room for him and as I left, I heard the most anguished cry ever to come from a man whose heart had been shattered. The woman he cherished and her baby would never come home.

A few days later, I drove Jenny, Hope and Sarah, another receptionist, out to the funeral in a little town about half an hour away. Linda and Zach—she’d picked out the name a few months before—were in the same casket. I don’t remember anything about the service; how much can one remember after nearly twenty-five years?

After the ceremony we joined the procession out of town to a state highway, then onto one of the many rural back roads, to a small cemetery a several miles north. The cemetery drive was unpaved and rutted; we pulled off into the grass near the fresh gravesite. The afternoon was cool and sunny, not cold and rainy like the night they died. A breeze stirred the few leaves that had fallen; in a few weeks all the trees would be bare.

The minister spoke a few words before we gathered around the casket to say our goodbyes. We drove back to the office in silence, sharing a grief that needed no words.
I sometimes look back and wonder “What if?” Linda would be fifty-two now. Maybe she’d have been a grandmother by now as her daughter is now in her thirties. Perhaps she and Danny would have had more kids.

Zach would be twenty-four. He might have been a good kid, then morphed into a sullen teenager, giving his parents many a tale with which to embarrass him when he finally matured. Maybe he would have done a stint in the military and made his parents proud.

Cherish what you have, because you never know when it may be lost forever.

© Can Stock Photo Inc. / Frankljunior

Crimson Tides

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Another day in the life…

Few things in my profession are more terrifying than obstetrical hemorrhage.  Every year more than 144,000 pregnant women bleed to death, even here in the U.S. Sometimes we anticipate problems; more often we have no warning.

I aged ten years one afternoon treating one such woman.

Marylou was in labor with her third child and everything was going well.  Her cervix had dilated to 6cm and I thought she’d deliver in the next two hours or so.  Suddenly, she said, “I can’t breathe,” and the baby’s heart rate dropped to 60 beats per minute or bpm (normal baby heart rate is 110-160 bpm).  Her cervix was completely dilated but the baby wasn’t looking any better and too high in the birth canal to deliver with forceps, so we took her to the operating room.

The baby came out screaming and we were all relieved…for the moment.  We closed the uterus but the suture line slowly oozed blood.  The bleeding seemed to improve after a few minutes, so we finished.  We noticed a little bit of blood around the staples that closed her skin, but it wasn’t unusual.  The nurse pushed on her uterus to expel any remaining blood before taking Marylou to the recovery room. Everything seemed fine.

Blood started gushing from Marylou’s vagina about 30 minutes later and it wasn’t clotting. I ordered another four units of blood—we had two units already waiting from before surgery—while her nurse started a second IV.  We then wheeled her to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and called one of the critical care specialists.

The specialist was a man of few words who, until that day, wasn’t known for anxiety under pressure. When he pulled the sheet off Marylou, blood was visibly welling up between her thighs.  His eyes widened as he quietly said, “We need more blood.”  That’s when we knew Marylou was in trouble.

I ran to the blood bank and came back with four units, but her blood was pouring out as fast as we replaced it.  I was starting to worry she might bleed to death and took her back to the operating room. I asked a physician on the unit, who had also been my senior resident in training, for help. We tried packing her vagina with laparotomy sponges, but the blood soaked through them and ran onto the floor. He looked at me and said, “I think it’s time to give up and take it out.”  We quickly prepared her for surgery.

One of the hospital’s hematologists brought a portable refrigerator to the operating room and directed the transfusion while we took her uterus out.  We emptied the hospital blood bank of Marylou’s blood type; then we emptied out the local Red Cross. By the time Marylou was stable and out of danger, she’d received 30 units of blood and several liters of IV fluids.

Marylou suffered from the “anaphylactic syndrome of pregnancy,” something we used to call an “amniotic fluid embolism.”  Baby’s skin cells and amniotic fluid get into the mother’s circulation, causing a severe reaction in a small number of women, much like that in someone with an allergy to penicillin, peanuts or bee stings. The afflicted patient has trouble breathing and her blood pressure can fall low enough to put her into shock.

Marylou’s blood wouldn’t clot because the reaction used up most of the blood’s clotting factors, creating a potentially fatal complication called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). Red blood cell packs lack those clotting factors, so we need to transfuse other blood products—fresh frozen plasma, cryoprecipitate and platelets—to treat massive hemorrhage.  Since then hospitals have developed transfusion protocols based on the military’s battlefield experience.

The survival statistics for amniotic fluid embolism have never been good.  One hundred percent of women with an amniotic fluid embolism who aren’t treated die; up to seventy percent die in spite of treatment.  Sometimes babies have been delivered by Cesarean section after the mother has gone into cardiac arrest and died.

Marylou woke up in the ICU four days later and asked me, “Did I scare you?”

More than you will ever know.

 

 

Image:© Can Stock Photo Inc. / Frankljunior