My Job Isn't What I Do

I really wanted to be a veterinarian, but by the time I could go to college, I was a single mom and didn't think it was fair to my daughter for me to go to school for that long. So, I choose to be a nurse.

I have been a nurse in the Intensive Care Unit for close to thirty years now. It's intense, just like it says in the name. I fight off death every day. I mostly win. WE mostly win, I should say. It takes a whole team of us to provide lifesaving care. Sometimes we lose that fight. Sometimes it is a release and it makes the loss a bit easier. Sometimes it is crushingly sad. It's never mundane. I remember every lost fight. I still see some of the lost in my dreams.

But I really do love my job. I've taught professionals with much more college than I have important lessons that have surely affected hundreds of others. And I've been taught life changing lessons by those who haven't a third-grade education, that in hand affected hundreds of others through me. I love my job because every important particle of life is within it. Knowledge, compassion, inventiveness, artistry, esteem, respect, complex medications, technical machinery, and love. I've witnessed love so deep, gazing upon its end cracked me open and made me strive for it. There is empathy and apathy in my job. Elation and despair. Ignorance and divinity.

Yes, divinity. I tried to save a duck once, but I was a nurse, not a veterinarian. It had been shot by a hunter that could not reach it so far out into the bay where it landed, wounded. It made me angry, I will admit. I scooped the sodden creature up into my boat and took it home, assessed it, then placed it in a box with a towel over it so it could rest. I had found one tiny hole in its breast and hoped it hadn't gone in too far. But it had. I checked on her after five minutes and her head was laying over, but she was breathing. I knew she was going to go. What I didn't know was how she was going to change my life, and in turn so many others.

I stared down into the box. Her breathing slowed and her body started to relax into death. My anger turned to sadness. Then, right there, never leaving the box, she soared away, surely ascending into the heavens, she soared, and my sadness turned to wonder. Her wings made ghostly movements, spreading and gliding wide. And then she was gone from this world. I had just watched that duck's soul leave her body and it was the most eloquent thing I have seen to date. What does this have to do with nursing? It is my answer to the question that is asked of me often: Where will they go when they die? I don't really know, but I know they soar.

I've seen divinity. It is tangible to me. It does not require faith any longer, as I have seen life go on past where most all of us think it ends, after it has indeed ended, when all that is left are feathers in a box. I've known a brain-dead patient hold on for many hours while their daughter flew across the country to be there when they crossed over. I kept giving this apparently unthinking, unknowing, ventilated person updates, "Your daughter is leaving her house now. She will be here. She wants you to wait for her. She's changing planes now. Two more hours. She's landed. She will be here in a half hour." That patient died two minutes after the daughter got to the bedside, leaving a broken body in a bed. Feathers in a box. The patient had waited for their child to say goodbye. I made sure the daughter knew how hard their parent had fought to stay here for her. And it mattered. It probably still matters to those who loved that patient. It still matters to me.

My job has allowed me to impact many lives. For thirty years, I have been a stone tossed into a pond. The ripples spreading out from me have been nourishing and healing, well beyond those whom I have actually touched and healed directly. Now in this global health emergency that has been politicized, the ripples of a virus are reaching back to me, making the waters turbulent and rancid.

My job is no longer who I am but who I used to be, who we all once were collectively as healthcare workers. The many healthcare professionals on the frontlines, from the housekeepers to the doctors, are becoming someone else. We don't have the time to fight as hard as we used to fight for life, at least not with the same passion. Nor do we have as many tools to fight with, nor the empathy with which we used to fight. We don't have the time to help a soul transition gracefully and painlessly to the other side, nor to comfort a grieving family until the tears stop. My job isn't something I do. It is who I have now become. Not the same person. Not the same nurse.

A harried nurse at battle with a virulent disease while the disbelieving masses throw innuendos into our masked and shielded faces. The nurse that swallows her tears as a patient begs for mercy and apologizes for not knowing better before we place tubes that will help them breathe, but will also keep them from speaking.

Many of those patients will become feathers in a box. I am sure they must soar. They must. Although I haven't seen it. For this, I need faith.