Coping?

On the back of my ID for the ambulance is a small sticker with the name, date of birth and date of treatment for a three month old girl named Gwen. Worcester EMS brought her in asystolic on the monitor, two Worcester firefighters doing CPR on her tiny body. A tube smaller in diameter than a drinking straw had been gingerally inserted down her trachea and a tiny bag valve unit was being used to pump breaths of air into her lungs.
I had two pairs of gloves on, I always do when I work a code or any "real" emergency for that matter. I remember watching the lights from the Worcester medic truck as it backed up into the ambulance bay, throwing flashes of red and yellow about the code room. Vaguely the voice of Dr. Diaz telling us not to get excited and that this was like any other code comes back to me.
Her eyes were the worst part, tiny pale blue orbs that looked up at me while I used my thumbs to do compressions. Trying to block out the fact that she's a cute little baby (really a beautiful little child) I stare at the wink and wiggle my compressions are making on the monitor. A resident, blond hair and strangely eyes of the same color takes a laryngoscope and opens the young patient's mouth to make sure tube placement was correct.
At the back of the room a WEMS medic says. "We gave her an amp in the truck, we did the whole algo with her....." His voice trails off and I feel wetness on my face. The respitory tech took over bagging from a Worcester fireman, he stands dumbly off to the side, unable to move until a nurse gently guides him a way to the back of the room.
"Can you close her eyes." My voice doesnt sound like my own, coming from somewhere else. I keep pressing my thumbs, hands almost cramping. "Please close her eyes," I ask the respitory lady again.
Her voice is small, shaking. "I tried, they won't stay closed." I feel my head nodding vigorously as my cheeks burn. The monitor still shows that weird unnatural EKG that CPR produces. Biting my lip I keep staring at that monitor, trying not to do what I'm doing.
"Nick," one of the nurses, a normally fun woman with cute little square glasses asks me "are you okay? Need to switch?" I can't talk so I just shake my head. I'm fine, I can take it.
Diaz comes back into the room and asks the Worcester crew to leave. Reluctantly they leave, a firefighter coming over one last time to look down at the little victim of whatever ended her life so early.
"All right guys," Tavi, Diaz's nickname, starts off. "Family's here. Keep doing compressions and make it look like we're doing something. It'll help them cope. Worcester says that shes been down for 25 minutes now." I bite my lip harder, pinch my eyes shut for a minute and then force them open to check the monitor.
When I hear her voice its quiet, tinged with the weight of whats going on. "Nick, you should leave the room."
"Why, what'd I do wrong?"
"No, honey, nothing. You didn't do anything wrong. You're crying." Shes pretty close to crying too and indeed a minute after I leave, she does too. When I strip off my gloves I just barely choke out an apology to the code team, a team that has already dwindled as people had to leave the room from the pain. "Don't be sorry." Tavi calls out, "Don't ever be sorry for your actions here today." Nodding I leave the room, feeling the tears streaming down my face as I scramble through the packed ED, practically running out in to the EMS bays.
The Worcester crew is still there and a medic wordlessly hands me a cigarette as the five of us sit there in silence. Its freezing out, one of those Worcester fall nights where it feels like it could snow but I dont realize how cold it is until another tech comes out and hugs me, tears coming down her face too.
"Em, I'm sorry I left you in there....." Her grip is like a vice, too strong for a girl her size.
"Don't be sorry. It means you have a heart, thats why you do your job. Its why we do this." One of the Worcester guys, I couldn't tell if it was a medic or a fireman is sobbing too, his budy propping him up.
I go off to the other side of the bays, behind the big decon trailer that we keep there and make a few phone calls. I call my girlfriend, a vet tech at a 24 hour emergency center out on the Cape and leave a message asking if I can see her the next day. I call my dad and tell him what happened, leaving out the details about how the baby looked.
The next day my phone rings at nine am. Its the employee services office asking me to come into a voluntary stress debriefing later in the day. Groggily I promise to think about it then promptly turn off the phone and think about how the little bundle seemed so heavy on the walk down to the morgue the night before. I think about the detective who came in, how for some odd reason all I could think upon meeting him was "God I want that fleece." He had a really nice black Northface fleece.
When Mandy comes down, we sit on the back porch as she smokes one of her cigarettes, I tell her about how I couldn't sleep without seeing that little girl's face the night before. I show her the little sticker on the back of my ID that I don't remember putting there. Then we go down to O'Rourke's, a local Irish pub where I have my own seat and the bartender proudly proclaims that her establishment is the "Future owner of Nick's pension and liver." I'm kind of a regular there and when we sit down the digital TVs, brand new additions to the Irish eatery, fizzle out and die.
"This would never happen at Applebees." I tell Cora, the Irish lilting bartender. We laugh and I start in on my steak and cheese, Mandy enjoying her first Sam Adams Winter Lager ever. And for those two hours, a trip to O'Rourke's is never less than two hours, I forget about Gwen and the hell of the night before.
But now, almost a week later, I can't sleep or even close my eyes without seeing her own, tiny and oddly beautiful as they stared up at me. It was like she could see us, her little curious eyes watching everymove we made like a living baby, with that "everything is new" glaze of discovery still hauntingly there. I hope the new place where she is now, where ever it is that she went, is better than where she left.