Creative Writing Awards 2024: “My First Code” by Liz Daskalakis

The 21st annual Creative Writing Awards (cwa) were held on April 24, 2024, a celebration of the liberal arts deeply embedded in the science and clinical practice of the Yale Cchool of Nursing (YSN) community. After a keynote speech by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Pam Belluck, each of the three winners read their work aloud. Three honorable mentions were also saluted.

My First Code

by Liz Daskalakis ‘26 MSN

I was overly naïve and earnestly optimistic to think

That my first code would be exciting.

Not because I was overconfident

Or a pompous nursing student

As if there is such a thing

But within me lingered one of the most sinister and misleading of emotions:  

Hope.

During CPR training

In a confining, dusty room,

With armless and legless mannequins sprawled out before me

They teach you how to perfuse the cardiac muscle

Using your energy to thrust life back into the lifeless.  

But what they fail to teach you

Is when your skills are simply not enough

Not enough time

Not enough energy

Not enough oxygen

Not enough power

To save the person lying beneath you.

It’s not personal.

The right atria does not care

That you received six hours of CPR training.

The right ventricle does not care

That your only life purpose in that moment is to save someone else.

The left atria does not care

That a family is trembling in the corner hearing their loved ones’ ribs crack

Under the pressure.

The left ventricle does not care

That the person in my first code is barely a person

Because that person is three months old.

While I was not performing compressions

Their seismic activity reverberated through my bones

As I observed behind a glass window in the PEDI ED.  

A mother and father watched seven strangers work over

Blue-tinged toes

A tiny chest decorated with monitors

The most precious creation they will ever make.  

Their wails are a sound

That have laid a den in my ears

Etched in my brain like a tattoo

That aches and haunts me

Every time I gaze at another infant

Wondering how such a pure love, created from scratch

Can be taken away for no reason.

My first code

Lasted forty minutes.  

Some of the worst forty minutes I have ever witnessed.  

But my experience is diminutive in comparison

To that of the infant’s parents

Who watched

Who waited

With delayed anticipation

For the interpreter to utter “el esta respirando” –  

“He is breathing” in Spanish.  

But the waiting gnawed at their souls for forty minutes

And in the cruelest twist of fate,

Those treacherous words were never delivered.  

I was overly naïve and earnestly optimistic to think

That my first code would be exciting.

I thought butterflies in my stomach would

Flutter their delicate wings so vigorously

That their waves would induce  

A palpable sign of life for the person that needed air

More than I did in that moment.

But instead

There were hornets

Gnawing at my stomach

Stabbing their stingers into my nerves

Trying to get out with nowhere to go.   

Read More CWA 2024 Winners