Welcome to this week’s Womanly Wednesday! In this series, different women share their struggles, bravely opening up about their stories so that other people would be inspired and encouraged. Make sure to check out the Womanly Wednesday archives to read other posts from this series!
I am a pediatric cardiovascular intensive care nurse, which means I take care of babies & kids who have life threatening heart conditions. Being a pediatric nurse has been one of the best, most humbling, and challenging experiences of my life. There have been beautiful miracles and horrible losses.
Sometimes the patients have a very ‘easy’ to fix problem. But more often than you would expect, they have extremely complicated hearts and sometimes even need an entirely new heart via transplant.
When the kids get better and go home its amazing and awesome, but as soon as they leave, we get another kid just as sick, if not sicker, to take their place. Often when a child has had open-heart surgery or especially a heart transplant, they aren’t ‘cured.’ We say that having a heart transplant is trading one disease for another. These kids have to stay on medication for the remainder of their lives and eventually their new hearts will get tired and fail as well. They are in and out of the hospital for the rest of their lives and constantly in fear of rejection (where their body starts to attack their new heart).
Kids typically stay for several weeks or months on the unit. I get to know them and their families really well. And sometimes, if I’m really, really lucky, the families open their hearts to me and welcome me as part of their family. I wouldn’t trade these experiences or the love I have for these incredible people for anything in the entire world.
When I go to work it’s like stepping into a whole new reality. A reality where babies are living on breathing machines or being sustained on life support. A reality where parents are struggling to split time between their healthy children at home and their sick child at the hospital. It’s a place filled with the bravest, strongest moms and dads you’ll every meet. It’s where parents are forced to watch their infants suffer and deteriorate. And it’s a place where two-pound warriors are literally fighting for their lives every second.
Once I had a patient who was born with a perfectly normal heart. A few months after she was born, she was rushed to the ER in critical condition. For some reason her heart was failing and the doctors could never figure out why. She went from being a perfectly healthy newborn baby to a little girl who couldn’t breath without a ventilator and required constant IV medication to keep her heart pumping.
Her family was devastated. For weeks, her grandma would cry out to God in broken English and ask, “God? Where are you?” Day in and day out I walked beside this family as they struggled to understand why this was happening.
There was a week that I spent rejoicing with a family and preparing them to go home with their little one. One night I got to work to find that this precious baby, who I had been caring for over the past several months, had crashed, was put on life support, and was taken off of life support all in the span of 24 hours.
The baby had passed away early in the morning, but when I walked into his room to hug his parents, his momma was still holding him, rocking him.
You have to understand, when someone’s body has been through that much trauma and has been gone for that long, they don’t look like themselves anymore. The room was dark, the air heavy. His beautiful face no longer looked like his own, his little body was swollen, black and blue. No mother should ever, ever have to see her child like that.
I will never forget her. I will never forget having to take her baby from her arms. Or how her mother and sister had to hold her back. How her husband sobbed into his own father’s shoulder as I wrapped their little world up in a blanket and carried him to the morgue.
I wish my first response to these experiences was childlike faith in God. But I wrestle with God so much in these moments and I don’t understand.
It is hard to watch babies suffer & parents break under grief and still trust that God is who He says He is. It’s hard to see their pain and trust that God’s ways are higher. It’s agonizing to care for them, love them, walk this journey with them and believe that God could possibly bring anything good from their suffering.
Sometimes I have to fight to believe. When I’m struggling to trust God in these moments, I often meditate on what the apostle Peter said in the midst of suffering:
“Lord, to whom shall I go? You have the words of eternal life.”
– John 6:68
When I am struggling with doubt, these words reign true.
Where else could I go?
What could possibly be more sufficient than God and His promises? Regardless of whether I understand His decisions or not, what other option do I have? What brings more comfort or makes more sense?
If there isn’t a God, suffering calls only for despair. If I don’t have God’s promises then there really is no point of suffering. If there is no God, there is no end to suffering and no promise of eternal life. Without God, this suffering is random and hopeless.
There is hope in grief. I may not understand His plan or know his reason, but at least I can rest in the promise that there IS a reason. Good WILL come from this, regardless of if I see it in this life or not. Suffering has a reason and it isn’t random or hopeless. It is so above me, and so much more holy than I could ever comprehend or understand.
In the midst of grieving, questioning, and fighting to believe God – this verse is an anchor. These little babies bring me to my knees. They cause me to realize how much more I have to learn about God and His heart and how great my need for Him is. My hope is in Christ, in the sacrifice He made, and I have peace in his promises.
Jessie is the owner of Jessie Martin Photography. She is married and lives in Spokane, Washington on 40 acres of land with her family. Her love for photography has been greatly impacted by her work with sick children & broken hearts. Her goal is to communicate the value and beauty of everyday moments through her lens. Her blog is a place where she transparently tells her story through writing and photography. It is also a place of community for fellow photographers to learn and encourage one another. If you are a fellow photographer, nurse, or just want to talk please feel free to message or call me anytime: Jessie@jessiemartinphotography.com / 425.312.2372
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The story about having to take the baby away from the mom immediately brought me to tears. It truly takes a special person to choose that kind of job for themselves. I thank God that there are people willing to do so, though. Stories like that make me want to pick up my sleeping baby, hug her tight, and pray I never have to experience such heartbreaking grief.
So heartbreaking! I started working in our pediatric ER shortly before I got pregnant (I had worked with adults until then) and I had to watch parents bring in their children who had died at night in their cribs or who they suffocated while co-sleeping or were in respiratory distress… Thankfully, I don’t work in a children’s hospital, so most of the really sick kids go to the children’s hospital if they can make it, but we get our fair share of sick/dying/dead kids. I remember getting there one morning and a family had just brought in their child that they found already long gone in her crib. It was so heartbreaking watching the parents after the loss of their child. And when I was in high school, my best friend’s sister OD’ed and I walked out of the hospital with her parents after they pulled life support. I will never forget her mom crying out that she needed to go back and see her again. I cannot even begin to imagine. My biggest fear is losing my child. I was distraught about putting my cat to sleep! Can you even imagine if that was a CHILD?! I could have held onto my cat forever, and I know that would be me rocking my baby and never wanting to let go. It breaks my heart just thinking about it and brings me to tears instantly. I feared losing a child before I ever even had one, but now that I’m a mom, I can’t even put into words how fearful I am that my child will die before me. No parent should EVER have to say goodbye to their child. Working in an ER has made me so grateful to have healthy family members, but it also has really opened my eyes to how short life can be and how unexpected the end can come…
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