I retired after 26+ years as a nurse. Sometimes the enormity of that still hits me square in the face. All. The. Patients. I touched in My Life. And All. The. Patients. who touched me.

A lot of them are gone. The number one rule in healthcare has always been this — you can’t save everyone. And I didn’t. I couldn’t. I did what I could, with what I had, where ever I was. Then I let it go.

I’ll admit there were some I pulled healing energy out of the air for. My favorite was a fellow biker chick named C.C. who had come for her breast cancer surgery. We compared notes on motorcycles and rock music as she drifted off to sleep. The surgeons told me a few months later that she was healing and doing very well.

But then, that’s what they always told us. And we would never know the difference. So often a patient’s name didn’t even stay in our memory banks past the end of their case, as we bustled and hustled and made the OR ready for the next one. And there was nearly always a next one.

Initially, I could remember every single patient I laid my hands on — pumping life back into them to the sounds of chaos. Alarms, shouting, running feet — but everything becomes tunnel vision and you just concentrate on the count. Making sure you’re going fast enough, deep enough — to do the job the patient’s heart is incapable of. But somewhere along the line, there came a day when I had just done this too many times. I stopped being able to recall the faces and the names. One code blended into the next.

We didn’t always get them back.

I had worked in the ICU before I came to the OR. That meant I was familiar with the after-care of a deceased patient. Morgue care, it’s called. Some OR nurses I worked with didn’t even know where the morgue was. But I did. And because time is a valued commodity in the OR — I was often pulled from my room to go to a room where a patient had died. To take care of the body, the aftermath, and the paperwork involved when we lost someone. I would go with the orderlies to sign the body into the morgue. I knew it all — it was second nature — I had made that particular trip more times than I could count.

I never minded though. I never treated any patient other than as the Human they were. Even after they left their vessel behind. Sometimes, I could feel them hanging around. Everyone goes into the OR expecting to wake up, sometimes I think the souls we lost were a bit confused at first to wake up without their bodies.

So I would talk some, cry some — because everyone deserves a few tears, and get on with the business at hand. That was the job. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost.

That was Life.

But even after all those years, there are some, like C.C. who stay with you. Even now.

I remember the name and the face of the first patient I coded and we lost. I remember the name and the face of the first child we lost as well. I remember the peace-filled passings and the full-court press of running a code. I remember counting, or charting while looking into the faces of the team around me with confidence. I remember the wails of the families and how the grief of strangers can cut your soul to shreds.

It’s been nearly two years since I had anything to do with a patient. In December of this year, my license will become inactive. But 26+ years of memories will remain.

The ghosts of my patients past will follow me until I take my own last breath in this life. May there be a nurse there to talk some, cry some, and get on with the business at hand.

Namaste.