Working in the hospital has never been easy for me. I do not understand what is so special about it that attracts me. When I was younger, I hated even thinking about working in the hospital. Some of the patients smelled funny, and most of the time everyone looked nervous. After working on the night shift for about a year, I've found that hospitals are more than just a place where people are sick. They are a place to observe life and death. I think the thing that scared me the most was the thought of seeing any person struggling with life in those last minutes.
Though I didnt like it, I had many experiences that made me continue my work. One of my most memorable patients was an elderly man who had Lou Gehrig's disease. When I met him, he was on a ventilator, a feeding machine, and with the needles inserted in his left hand. All this was to keep him alive. He was slowly losing his ability to control his muscles; he couldn't talk, so I learned to lip-read what he wanted, which wasn't an easy task for either of us. I didn't stop trying, and he didn't give up on me. After a while, we were able to communicate fairly well. When I talked about my friends, school classes, and the weather, he would mostly listen to me and not ask any questions. I cried when I found out that he had died. I knew it would happen one day; I just didn't want to lose my friend. After thinking about it for so long, I believed I was strong enough to take the emotion. But I was wrong.
I also took care of an 18-year-old that had been in a car accident. He was a normal teenager and was having fun on a Saturday night. He was a passenger in that car, and his drunken friend was trying to impress his girlfriend. He had been put in the neurology unit because they suspected that he might have damaged his spinal cord or brain. Thirty minutes later he was laying on a hospital bed in a neck brace with the horror of having a surgery. I knew he was afraid, so I talked to...