YOU see them with a grateful heart as they walk on hands, and do somersaults with a patient’s extreme despair, suffering life-altering trauma, joys, rage and despair.
Ordinary people have such experiences only a few times during their entire lifetimes.
Through a daily basis of witness and involvement in death, birth and celebration, nurses sign up for life. They have certain qualities: an abundance of human compassion and a kind of wisdom born of the heart, where fulfillment could only come from the knowledge that one had made a positive, if not a profound difference in another’s life, they would rearrange fate.
Remarkable men and women that quietly continue to provide the day to day grit from the edge of life — practicing a variety of specialties including cardiac care, the ER, intensive care, obstetric, orthopedic surgery — that provides poignant, if not outrageous, stories drawn from the edge of life.
Their patients come in all shapes, sizes, ages and colors. They were frightened, brave, gentle, arrogant, demanding, and considerate. They were young and old, and clumsy and adept, while others were subtle and crude under hardened cells (the way nurses do). They were human beings in pain. What is it like to be sick and vulnerable, to witness and record the isolation and alienation that comes eventually to all of us, when finally we are all patients?
They live a life where the frustration comes uninvited, horrified by what the insurance companies and hospital corporations are doing to the medical world.
This isn’t a piece about politics, but simply getting to know more about these angels of mercy as they go on about the business of caring and healing. You can only feel respect, awe and love for these devoted, tireless human beings, whose work is ardorous and complex, requiring the exercise of the very brightest faculties of the mind, while constantly appealing to the emotion and higher feelings. Sir Williams Osler once said that.
At any ICU ward is a kaleidoscope of broken lives and days and nights flowed into one another, the nurses go through their daily toils of feeling pulses, listening to hearts, lungs and abdomens for finite sounds of prowl for complication as they load vitamins and minerals, like pumping fuel into a powerful car, with no steering wheel or tires. The tension permeated at an ICU is a peculiar scene, as that type of strain that translates into blind hope for the best, expect the worse.
When tragedy strikes, the nurses deal with the patients, which is only half of the story, because completing the cast, are the walking wounded, otherwise known as the surrounding family members who are thriving in blind hope. Where grief is grief. Are there words less painful?
In the medical arena, even as healthcare debate rages on with the growth of the HMO industry, the nurses quietly continue to provide the daily grit and deeply felt dedication that holds the healing profession together.
I have started interviewing nurses from my police beat days back in the Philippines when a nurse at the Veterans Memorial Hospital was paid P200.00 a month. But the fear of career backlash and reprisals have made them reluctant to talk to outsiders about their experiences. Truths drawn were stranger than fiction when nurses were allowed to speak to us in their own words.
Narratives ranged from inspiring to tragic, to the outrageously funny, real-life medical drama as experienced from our country, to here in the U.S. The gripping accounts gave us a new perspective of the horrors of tsunamis, earthquakes and the nightmare when someone runs amuck or is burned alive, trapped in a burning building…as we look in a pathetic impotence!
Home care, critical care, pediatric, and psychiatric nurses, with distinct voices and who through tears and laughter, are unflinching as they tackle the issues that afflict nursing care today.
But on the totem pole, nothing beats the nurse assigned a tragedy.
While for other patients, it could be quick and painless, for others a 79-year-old heart could just be flipping in and out of ventricular fibrillation at any hospice – at will. The nurses wonder how thin the lines between life and death, joy and sorrow, chance, fate, and the invisible forces which in split seconds change lives forever.
Then they waited until they heard the soft explosion of unrestrained weeping…
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
