Since I entered the workforce, I have been in healthcare. I knew I wanted to be a nurse. Even before I could earn a paycheck, I volunteered in hospitals and nursing homes. In one unit’s break room, there was a magnet on the refrigerator. I imagined it had been a gift of appreciation from a patient to one of the staff. It read:
Nurses are angels–without wings.
Being sixteen and practically an adult, I knew of course that I would never be transformed into a celestial being by passing my boards or pulling on a pair of nurses’ scrubs. But then being sixteen and young, I was prone to sentimentality and apparently enamored with the idea of becoming heavenly, because I clung tightly to the calling. And I have never forgotten that schmaltzy little magnet, nor what it implied: I could be a beautiful, wise, serene, saving, undefeatable force.
Flash to now and you will find me in a busy little oncology infusion room, swimming upstream. You’ll know me because my hair never sits quite right and my shoe is always coming untied. Clearly, angelic is not the proper adjective for me.
Fighting cancer is messy for everyone involved. It’s blood and guts and vomit and tears. I sit and hold hands that feel like my own. I palpate swollen abdomens and become sympathetically nauseated. I look into eyes that reflect my fears and it is clear to me that we are all down here in the mud together. My patients are painfully, sweetly, vulnerably human, and so am I.
I have no revelation on the meaning of my patients’ frailty. I have no powers. I am weak and fragile. I falter in faith. I am often afraid. I cannot fly away, nor carry anyone out of their suffering. Still–my colleagues and I–we’ll try and try and try (flapping, not flying).
