Emotinally Exhausting

This was one of those days in life that leaves at its end the feeling of having spent yourself for others. It is emotionally exhausting, hard to always be the strong one, hard also to divide your time between four or five people who are all in varying stages of physical, emotional, mental, spiritual distress. I stood holding a woman at least twenty years older than myself as she cried, vented, processed. For day after exhausting day she kept being told she needed to be strong, because being weak was just being selfish. I was finally the one who told her it was okay to cry, giving her permission in a sense to finally let down this barricade of emotion that no one else had dared to breach. But it was that opening that let us talk a little about Jesus. On to another patient who only breaching the beginning of a life-defeating battle with a terrifying disease, one that leaves his mind sharp as a tack while completely deteriorating the rest of his body. It's as if he is becoming trapped within a shell, and as he struggles for a breath through a closing airway he writes to me, his only way of communicating, that this scares him more every day. Scares him that one of these times that breath will never come. It is devastating to see how this disease has so suddenly wretched their family from the life they knew, and leaves me feeling helpless to comfort. A third pleasantly confused elderly woman seems to be the balance, until seemingly out of nowhere she becomes psychotic, hallucinating, paranoid, afraid I am plotting with the man she thinks she sees outside her window and coming to kill her. All trust is lost, she doesn't know who anyone is, she hits, she yells, she screams. Emotionally exhausting.