Sunrise hits different when it comes at the end of a 12-hour night shift in ICU.
For nurses, it’s the light at the end of the tunnel. No matter what challenges the night has delivered, sunrise means the finish line is in sight and the next shift will be rolling through the double doors and taking over any minute.
It’s also a reminder that we are the lucky ones. After the sun has risen, we get to walk our healthy bodies out the door and go home to our lives and families – unlike the people whose lives we’ve spent the last 12 hours trying to save.
The dawn of a new day is a major milestone for the critically ill, who have survived the night in their fight against a life-threatening emergency.
Sometimes the patients have been in ICU for days and other times they are new arrivals after a night that has delivered the very worst of surprises.
In other parts of the city, loved ones are waking up with the jolting reminder that their world has been turned upside down.
While the family members of ICU patients are in crisis mode – fielding messages and calls, reorganising daily life, catching snippets of sleep – doctors and nurses are working around the clock to return their loved ones to them.
Sometimes, all that can be done has been done, and we know that this sunrise will be the patient’s last.
It’s a moving experience to be with someone, not long ago a stranger, for what will be their last ever sunrise.
Where possible, I try to open the blinds and let the sun shine in, before briefly pausing the busyness of ICU nursing to hold their hand and quietly honour their life in that moment.
There are as many variations to the circumstances of someone ending up in ICU as there are people in a city – car accidents, cardiac arrests, assaults, organ failure, a sudden loss of consciousness for a multitude of reasons.
No two situations are ever exactly the same, except for the certainty that at the end of a long night, the sun will rise.
For other more fortunate families, the impending death of one person, means they are waking up to the realisation that this is the day their loved one will be saved through organ donation. The day they wished, prayed and begged for has unbelievably arrived.
But for the organ donor’s family, the new day marks the first of many firsts, as they now have to face every birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day without one of the main characters of their lives.
So much quiet, unseen emotional upheaval happens at the most beautiful time of day. And once you’re an ICU nurse, dealing with the pointy end of life and death, you start to fully appreciate and honour the enormity of a simple sunrise.
* This story was published in the Sunday Herald Sun on November 24.
