Death.

Working at a hospital especially in a critical care setting, you see a lot of death.
Sometimes death comes in groups.
Sometimes it's weeks before you have a death.
Most of the time I block it out, you learn to separate from it.  That's your job.  It's life.  This is what happens.

Without elaborating too much (for confidentiality sake), I had a patient death recently that hit me harder than usual.
This patient I had taken care of all three nights.  Very nice person, not terribly unstable, no drips, but in the CCU for a very good reason,  This patient was a great person, a little anxious (reasonably), and the family was wonderful.  When I left that week for my 5 days off, I didn't give a second thought about it.  This patient was to be better and get out of the unit within the next 2 days.

I come back to work to find out this patient had died a couple of days later unexpectedly.

It's weird to me because I've had many great patients, with wonderful families, that I didn't expect to pass away and yet this one affected me differently.

I've come to terms with it now and it wasn't that I was heartbroken/sobbing.  It's just a little piece of me was different after that and I can't quite put my finger on it.

I'm not even sure why I wrote this, but deaths are something in my life that happens often and I guess I just wanted to share how sometimes I deal with it.... and sometimes I don't.