--When I was a student nurse in the MICU (Medical Intensive Care Unit as opposed to Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) or CCU (Cardiac Intensive Care Unit), there was a person on the unit who had coal miners' black lung disease and pneumonia on top of  that. We are talking about an adult with a 105 degree fever. Sadly, he did not survive.

--Since we were primarily a head and neck surgical unit, attending physicians used to like to send anyone with a tracheotomy tube to us because we were used to dealing with trachs....even though they weren't supposed to.  People who are on a ventilator for around a week usually undergo a trach because the regular intubation tube can cause the tracheal cartilage to become damaged....so we got an occasional patient with a closed head injury.

--There was a man in his 20s who had been found in his gangway, unconscious, beaten on the head with a baseball bat. He was medically just fine, but comatose. Maybe he moaned once in a while. One time, I was getting him up to a chair, and he started to fall forward on me! I rememberd the proper body mechanics and transferring techniques, and immediately braced his leg with mine, and widened my center of gravity. Then I realized, he wasn't falling! He was actually dancing with me! I knew right then, he'd be just fine.

--There was a nine-year-old girl from Puerto Rico who had been in a car accident. She had been thrown through a hatchback and her guardian was killed. She too was fine, but completely comatose, never made a sound. I was just puttering in her room and talking to her like you're supposed to. I can't remember what I said, but it ended with something like, "but you don't want that, do you?".  swore I heard a faint, "no". I shook my head like, "you are really hearing things now", and set myself up to watch her, repeating the question with the same voice inflection. She was talking all right. I told her I'd be right back and I hurried out because I knew the neurosurgeon, who had just been in, was probably still on the unit. I told him. I expected that he'd think I was crazy. Do you know he never even went back in the room? It's so characteristic, that he just charted, "she said no". By the next night, she was dialing her phone number from memory! She became the darling of the nursing staff. We used to order her pizzas.

--There was a Polish man (significant because he didn't speak English, the hospital had someone come and speak Polish to him, but it didn't snap him out of it.) He had been a drunk driver and ran into a truck so hard that when the paramedics found him, his head was resting on the truck's bumper. He never woke up while he was with us, so the outcome was unfortunately not likely to be good.

--There was a young woman with a suspected brain tumor, whose speech had started to deteriorate, and she showed us her handwriting deteriorate too. It turned out that she had an aneurysm that was expanding and pushing on parts of the brain that control those functions. 22-year-old me couldn't fully understand why the other nurses (moms) almost cried when they marveled at how it didn't burst during the pushing phase of childbirth (she had a 6-month-old at home. The surgery did the trick and the symptoms reversed. Tears of joy!