Tshering Sherpa, RN

My mom was admitted to Kaiser Vallejo’s ICU twice in 2026. During the first admission, she was diagnosed with a new onset of CHF and AFib. She was discharged on a blood thinner and subsequently developed a GIB. Her second admission was a month later, and within two days, I had lost her. She would have been 83 this year.

It is for the events of the day she passed that I would like to recognize Tshering “T” Sherpa, RN, and to express my profound thanks and admiration to the entire ICU team on both the day and night shifts.

It is a very strange thing to be a nurse in the ICU where your Mom gets admitted. You assume the role of a visitor, but you know everyone and already understand all the different things that are happening or are going to happen. You are at work, surrounded by your immediate family, and the life-and-death situations playing out leave you feeling overwhelmed. In some ways, the situation seemed surreal.

That day, T was working with a student nurse and was teaching her as he cared for my mom. As an RN, I couldn’t help but overhear and observe his teaching strategies. I was impressed. Not only was he patient and thorough in his explanations, but he also helped her understand why she was doing these tasks and the potential complications she might anticipate. Both the student and my mom were asking questions, and T was helping them both understand. Teaching the student may have been something that T was doing, but it also let my mom relax and be confident knowing that T was her nurse.

T was great with my mom. He enjoyed her sense of humor and the fact that at 82 she was rather feisty. Mom was frustrated because she had been up all night preparing for a colonoscopy, and now she was NPO before the procedures in the OR. She had a colonoscopy in the past, but she had never had an esophagogastroduodenoscopy. T helped to explain her situation, the procedures, and what to expect afterward. This helped to calm her nerves and helped me immensely. It allowed me to be my mom’s daughter, not my mom’s daughter who was a nurse. To me, that was so important. I got to be the one giving reassurance and telling her that I loved her while we reminisced through memories and looked forward to the future.

She left for the OR late that morning. When she came back to the ICU, she was still on low-level Neosynephrine and Oxygen. We were all bummed that the doctor did not find the source of bleeding, but we had a plan for further investigation once Mom was a little more stable.

T worked to wean her off the Neosynephrine and Oxygen. He also became her savior when he was able to give her ice chips and then water. It seemed like things were going well, and after a few hours I felt comfortable enough to go run some errands. I kissed her and told her that I would call her that night. That was the last time we spoke.

As I was making my way back to Vallejo at about 5:15 PM, I received a phone call telling me that my Mom was coding and that I needed to get to the ICU. I was in shock and behind the wheel with my wife, two cats, and dinner, but somehow managed to drive to the hospital.

When I walked into the unit, my presence was announced to the team working on my mom. She was intubated, and the Lucas device was performing CPR. I could see that they had restarted vasopressors to assist with her BP and that all my colleagues, especially T, were doing everything they could. I asked Dr. Lam, who was running the code, where we were at and found out that she was 20 minutes into the code without electrical activity.

I’m a Critical Care Nurse. I have been an RN for nearly 30 years and in healthcare for nearly 40 years. I knew the statistics, and I knew my mom. If she couldn’t live life on her own terms, then she wouldn’t want this life to continue. So, I told everyone to stop. I knew that she wouldn’t want heroics and that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if modern medicine brought back a pulse and not a person. I also knew that I was in shock and that my siblings were en route to the hospital.

I was asked if I wanted to leave all the tubes in place, and at first, I said yes so that my siblings could see how hard my colleagues tried to save our mom. On second thought, I chose to spare them that trauma so that they could remember Mom the way that she was the last time that they saw her.

T quickly ensured that she was extubated. He helped to cover her, brush her hair, and make her presentable. After extubation, she had some notable agonal breathing even though there was no heart activity. T made sure that Mom got some medications to help ease her transition and to not let her struggle after the events of the Code Blue. This put me at ease because I couldn’t have Mom in that state when my siblings arrived.

My siblings made their way into the room, and as they did, I replayed the events out loud for them. Each time I did, all I could think of was T. One minute he had a hungry patient that he was bringing food to, and the next minute she was in asystole, and he was calling a Code Blue. At the time, it made no sense why any of this had happened, and I knew that if I was in shock, all of my colleagues were.

When T completed his charting and was ready to leave that evening, he came back to Mom’s room to express his condolences to me and the siblings. I could feel the grief and despair coming from him. He lamented that he didn’t know what had happened. He painstakingly went through the last 10 minutes of her life before she coded. I could tell that he had hoped to give us some closure knowing that she had just slipped away, and it did. When T finished recounting these events, he and I were both distraught, but I was so thankful that he had been Mom’s nurse.

The biggest compliment that a nurse can give another nurse is that you would allow them to take care of your family. I wouldn’t have left my mom if I didn’t trust T to take good care of her. I already knew that he was a great nurse, but he went above and beyond to make Mom feel safe, to let me be her daughter, and our family was encouraged that everything would work out for the best.

Things did not work out the way that any of us expected or wanted, and while we accepted the outcome as best we could, I knew that my colleagues were hurting as much as I was. I had hoped that they would debrief after the Code. I had hoped that Management had checked on them, knowing that this loss was more than just a patient. My mom had gone to unit parties, picnics, and baby showers. She had been friends on Facebook with some of my friends from work. In a sense, she was one of us and part of our work family.

Over the next week, my thoughts kept returning to T, and I hoped he was all right. I kind of had a feeling that the loss of my Mom might be weighing on him. My wife encouraged me to reach out to T.

I had the chance to talk with T the week after my mom’s death, and it seemed that he was really beating himself up. We both agreed with Dr. B that she most likely had a massive PE. Because of her AFib, he felt that he should have strongly advocated for her to resume her anticoagulation. Maybe this would have prevented the PE, the Code Blue, and her resulting death. I conveyed to him that Dr. C had planned for Mom to remain off her anticoagulation for two weeks. During that time, we were hoping to find the source of the GIB.

Good nurses always want to learn and improve so that next time we might have a better outcome. Sometimes we are concentrating so hard on helping others that we forget that we need some help too. I hope that my conversation with T helped to relieve any burden that he was carrying due to my mom’s death. She wouldn’t have wanted him to feel bad about anything that happened and would have wanted to thank him for all his hard work.

I also hope that this underscores how important it is to check on our colleagues. No nurse should be beating themselves up for possibly causing harm.

Thank you, T, for your hard work, for caring, and for taking care of my feisty Mom. Thank you for being the nurse, so that I could be the daughter.