Do Not Resuscitate a Dead Relationship
Seven years went by and I still tried to save it
When I was working in the ER, we’d often treat a “last-ditch effort.” This was the patient who was, for all intents and purposes, deceased. Paramedics had been doing CPR for over an hour, or the patient had been found down with no indication of how long they’d been without a pulse, or they’d have an injury that seemed far too traumatic to survive. So we’d roll up our sleeves and try a Hail Mary, which sometimes involved cracking the patient’s chest open so the trauma surgeon could massage their heart back to life. Most of the time it didn’t work, but when it did, it was enough to keep us going for the next hundred last-ditch efforts.
I thought a lot about this while driving the 400 miles to my boyfriend’s school in northern California. It felt like the thing between us was at its end and all we were waiting for was for someone to pronounce it dead. But I stiffened my upper lip and placed my hands on the steering wheel, telling myself that I would be damned if I didn’t crack that chest open and massage that heart back to life with my own bare hands.
At the ER there were patients who seemed to be in perfectly good health until they encountered the big thing that killed them, like a gunshot wound or a car accident. Our relationship wasn’t like that…
