when it's time, it's time

One thing I have learned in the ER and truly believe to be the case the vast majority of the time is that when your time is up on earth, your time is up...regardless of modern medicine.  Maybe just because the idea helped me sleep better at night as a new nurse, but in so many cases there was literally nothing else we could do.  There was another example of this at work the other day.  A male patient in his 40's came in, he was not my patient, (thank goodness) and he was bleeding out of most if not all of his orifices due to complications and non-compliance with medicines and a long history of every type of abuse to his body you could think of.  He was losing blood so quickly that he was hooked up to the rapid infuser machine that warms and infuses large amount of fluid (blood in this case) into the body in a very short time.  To put things in perspective, the average adult human body contains about 5 units of blood at one time.  They infused 10 (!!!!) units into this guy, he was losing it so fast.  Seriously, there was nothing a single person on the face of this earth could have done to stop his dying.  I hate to break it to people out there that think we in the ER have magic skills of some sort, but we are mere mortals as well, prone to mistakes and only capable of so much.  I really like the idea that when your time is up, it's up because that adds to the idea that there is some sort of plan or schedule or something happening, a big picture if you will, and I like anything that lends itself to the idea that life is not all chaos and random happenings.