When I was in Grade school and still cute, I met my first love. I wanted to become a doctor. As days do changed man, so did my dream.
I then wanted to become an Accountant when I graduated from High School. I took qualifying exams in almost all schools offering Accountancy. But I ended up enrolling in the School of Nursing.
My first exposure to ICU, I did my first ambubagging, my grandmother as my patient.
Life was hard then that she keeps on being admitted to the hospital. During that time, the family is losing money from the vicious cycle of admission-discharge. Seeing the person who raised you undergoing a chronic battle, you can't just sit in one corner waiting what will happen next.
It was that time that I decided to pursue going out to a place that never crossed in one of my vivid dreams.
My mother objected my decision of leaving because that time, I already completed my exams for my US application. Ample bucks were spent just for me to acquire those hard-earned licenses.
But I am rebellious in nature.
It was on winter of 2009 when I first set foot in Riyadh despite of my mother's objection of me leaving. But the eagerness to help the family prevailed.
I received a weird phone call on my second month being far away from home. Two months after I left, we lost my grandmother to complications of Diabetes. Our Medical Director would always mention how to break bad news to the patient and relatives. How I wished there is also a way on how to break bad news to nurses.
That was my worst heartbreak being a nurse.
To be there with my patients while I can't be there to the person I dearly love.
Is it worth it?
It was the first time I uttered this question.
How many parents are reading this article?
How many of you missed the milestones of your kids?
How many of you have seen how your bedridden patients were able to walk again and yet, you were not there to witness the first step of your children?
How many of us left home with complete family members and returned back home without one of them?
Perhaps, at one point in your profession, you've asked the same question...
Is it worth it?
I didn't come home for the next 3 years since I left. I don't want to give my mother an impression that I made the wrong decision, that I should have stayed instead, I should have listened instead.
When you reached a certain level of pain in life, that pain could either make you or it can break you.
I was transferred to ICCU after my 3 years exposure in Surgical Ward, became the charge nurse in 6 month's time until to this point of revealing secrets. And yes, tears.
Doing the ICU routines made me feel that God gave me a chance to do the things I wished I was able to do for her. Touching my patients' hands is like running my hand to the hands I never got the chance to hold. And seeing my patients' eyes is like watching the eyes I never be able to see again.
And it feels like she's just so near.
In one of Paulo Coelho's books entitled "By The River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept", he mentioned that it's very rare that you end up with your first love.
I've written this article which was later published in our hospital's Newsletter.
I came to conclude that first love DOES die.
Because a greater form of love evolved.
I found it in doing morning care, in feeding my patients, in whispering good morning to them even if they are not responding.
Those are the moments I thanked God I did not become a doctor.
Our life is like a dot in the face of the world. Nothing is so significant. Our patients will forget our name. They'll not remember who we are. But the thing is, we know who they are.
Because It is in giving ourselves that we become significant.
Reciprocated or not.
In my recent vacation, 3 days before my flight, my mother was diagnosed to have a Type II Diabetes Mellitus. In ICU, we are checking our patients every 2-6 hours. But I can't do such for my mother who is living all by herself while her daughter, ironically, is the ICU In-Charge.
Last month, that turning point of my life turned 6 years.
Sometimes, when the sun beats down in one of the many windows of ICU, out of longing that somehow, how I wished that I can copy-paste myself so that I can do the same service I rendered to my patients and at the same time, to the people I loved most, I would still ask the same question:
Is it worth it?
But with God's unrelenting and stubborn grace, I would still get the same answer.
"You can't be successful in life without these two essential things:
Giftedness and Godliness.
Giftedness is our ability to turn thoughts into things.
Godliness is using that Giftedness to S E R V E ".-Bo Sanchez
