No One Dies on Weekends
She works nights; it suits her.
But on this night, when nursing student Devan Kaufman (CNL `22) strides into the surgical trauma ICU room where her patient lies under a fuzzy green John Deere blanket, he stops her in her tracks.
The middle-aged man is intubated, sedated, his arms and hair still speckled with dried blood and tubes snaking from every orifice. The Red Hot Chili Peppers thump out of the hospital room’s computer, a dissonance Kaufman notes. He’s not just a body in a cotton gown anymore, she thinks. Here was something personal.
Once the music’s been shut off, she turns to the man’s family, about to leave for the night: What kind of music does he like?
That night, with Johnny Cash’s baritone as a backdrop, Kaufman and her preceptor Lauren Morrison maneuver chlorohexidine wipes into his skin folds, wash the head smell from his hair, remove the now unnecessary IVs and soothe lotion on his dry patches. Kaufman speaks gently to him as if he was awake.
It’s a slow night, for once; there is time. The man under the John Deere blanket is on hospice care, and they know it won’t be long.
The following night, everything goes awry at once: another patient self-extubates, a new admission from the ER needs a ready room, and up and down the ICU hallway propofol alarms begin to beep in near unison as Kaufman and Morrison rush to add volume. In the frenzy, the man under the John Deere blanket dies, and Kaufman’s adrenaline rush is overtaken by grief once she’s behind the wheel of her car at shift’s end, the sun just glinting over the horizon.
She cries in the driver’s seat. Blearily navigates her way home. Showers, eats breakfast, writes a poem (it is the first time a patient has died during her shift), which will be read aloud at the start of ethics class. And finally, she drops off to sleep. It is only Monday.
No one dies on weekends by Devan Kaufman
No one dies on weekends;
less staff, less resources, less surgeries-
No one dies on weekends.
Coffee shop closed, motor vehicle accident, patient intubated-
No one dies on weekends.
Saturday is gray hair, bloodied arms, crying daughters-
No one dies on weekends.
Sunday is combing hair, moisturizing hands for holding family-
No one dies on weekends.
Monday morning, 9 AM, time of death-
No one dies on weekends.
Devan Kaufman, a native of Palisade, CO, and Alhambra, IL, earned a bachelor’s degree in global public health and, prior to nursing school, worked with immigrant and refugee populations with the International Refugee Committee and International Neighbors. A former medical scribe with infectious diseases physician Rebecca Dillingham, MD, Kaufman earns a master’s degree through the Clinical Nurse Leader program in spring 2022.