Being a nurse, again.
With all that I’ve been through these past 9 months, I wondered if I could go back to work. How would I treat a patient that had attempted to kill herself with a Tylenol overdose because her abusive boyfriend left her, when I’ve been fighting for my life? Would compassion be out the window for patients like this? I thought I might be ruined. No matter how sick someone was, I thought, how will I care for them selflessly, when I’m busy worrying about MY life, about MY disease process? Yesterday, I got my answer. I was sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my 26th (?) radiation treatment. There was a lady with whom I’ve developed a nodding aquaintance, talking to a lady I didn’t know, but she looked familiar. When the nodding aquaintance lady went in, she left the other lady with a wish of well-being and recovery. I used to dread this environment. I didn’t want it to be part of my life at all—the culture of cancer. I don’t belong to your club, I thought. Leave me out. Don’t talk to me. I’d bury my head in a magazine and ignore everything but the print on the page. I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid of acknowledging that I had cancer and that it would be a part of my life for the rest of my life…maybe I didn’t want to get to know anyone who, eventually, will also die of cancer—maybe before I did, reminding me of my own mortality again. Anyway, I was reading my magazine. They were running late, again. I saw out of the corner of my eye, this beautiful older lady, whom had been left alone. Her hair, a lovely silver pulled in a loose pony tail, touched gently upon her shoulders. She was wiping tears from behind her glasses, and was trying to cry quietly, as I had done on my first day. I put my magazine down, went over to her, moved the magazine that was in the chair next to her, and sat down with my arm around her. “It’s your first day, I can tell” “How did you know?” she asked, behind her sobs. “because I looked exactly like you do now, on my first day” She was scared, as I had been (as I still am, but now about the long term effects, not about maybe having made a mistake in decision.) She told me her name was Ann, and she’s maybe in her sixties. She told me she lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, and now she has found out she has lung cancer. At her age, they don’t give chemo. Listening to her, talking to her, made me feel better, somehow. I probably would not have liked someone talking to me when I first came in (though, who can resist a hug?) and as I went in to my treatment, and came back and found her still waiting in the waiting room, I couldn’t resist sitting and talking to her again, and calming her fears. By the time I left, I noticed she was smiling, and talking to another patient about non-cancer things, and I thought—I was good at this. This is the part of nursing that you can’t teach. You can teach the technical stuff, but you can’t teach someone to be there, and have compassion for another—you either have it or you don’t. The truely great nurses I know, the ones I aspire to be like, have this—they’re good at the skills, but they also genuinely care. They can crack a joke to alleviate fear or help someone feel less self-conscious, they can look you in the eye and hold your hand and just listen. The bad nurses are the ones that focus on the skills and act like anything else isn’t in their job description and you aren’t compensating them for caring, so they aren’t going to do it. I’m going to see Ann again, today, at the radiologist. I will listen, and smile, and maybe if she’s still scared, I’ll explain to her the way radiation works, and why it will help her. I’ll keep my fears about sarcoma and bullshit like that to myself, because those are long-term problems; she’s in her sixties. With radiation treatment, she’s likely to get to live a normal lifespan. The thing is, maybe so am I. And until I met Ann, I never thought of it that way. Nursing is an amazing thing—it’s as much for me as it is from me. I’m lucky to have made a career change—I never would have felt these things as an architect.
