I was just a striving ICU nurse then.
She breathe through the tube that was securely anchored so that everytime I would clear her airways and watched tears falling from her eyes, I won't forget that she's a mom fighting for her newly delivered twins. Her husband would come every morning, exhausted from what seemed only superheroes can endure. Babies in Neonatal Intensive Care, wife in Intensive Care. I forgot to complain I ate cold meal for breakfast that day. Or that I missed the elevator ride. Or that it's already my nth day of duty.
I was just too shy to complain of the many mishaps happening in my personal life. This world, when we only open our eyes, consists of pains that come in many names. That day, I was able to name one.
I learned that they waited to conceive after many years of trying. While the cardiac monitor keeps on alarming to her heart rate that exceeded the normal, a syndrome known as Takotsubo or "Broken Heart Syndrome", kept her to be under close monitoring in the ICU. Stroking her newly combed hair, I was taken to the time of how Sara and Abraham, in their old age, received the most special gift from God. It must be the most joyous recorded day of their lives. ICU and NICU, aside.
I cannot leave home without the rosary which always occupies the right side of my pocket. I hold it in times I feel down, when I feel small, when I feel life is throwing me a curve ball, when I lift a foot in front of the other but pulled me 3 steps backward, when the undulations are just too much to take it in. That day, I drew the curtain closed, held the rosary from my sacred place, grasped her palm and clasped it with the rosary inside. With shaking hand, I laid my hand on her head, closed my own eyes so that she won't see my welling tears and said the most fervent prayer I never uttered for how many days. I felt her hand squeezing mine, as if I was vindicated that I don't have to be a pious person to do such act. I squeezed back, to affirm that I understand.
That I understand her pains.
I understand her language of hope and her own faith, wherever it is coming from.
In a world that always seek for scientific evidences for almost anything, that secret prayer meeting, of a nurse and a patient, usually lasting for few minutes, was one of the weirdest things I did being a nurse, putting aside what science taught me in nursing school.
She was discharged from our Unit without seeing each other. I was heartbroken how it was an unceremonious goodbye. I was heartbroken that I wasn't able to thank her for the lessons that usually took place in the ICU cubicle. Her painful situation, my teacher, and the nurse, the student.
Since I wasn't able to thanked her well, I decided to serve well with every patient I encountered.
So many times when I would lay awake from exhaustion that cannot put me to sleep, I would wonder what kind of a person I would be if I have been a doctor and not a nurse. Or I settled to be in a corporate world overlooking the metropolitan. When weekends are made to stay late in bed snuggling someone else.
Far from hospital smell.
Far from holidays that are not really holidays in the world of healthcare.
Far from inconsolable cries from people who lost their loved ones.
Far from paraplegic patient who survive the daily struggles of only eyes moving.
Far from watching patient fading inch by inch and wonder how I would bid goodbye when it's my turn.
Far from the daily hazard of being broken-hearted.
There's no one book that can teach a nurse not to be emotionally attach to the patients.
Nor one book to teach a nurse not to love them either.
Because the baffling reality is that...
you can never fully understand the nature of being a nurse...
... when you never had your heart broken.
Salute to all the nurses all over the world!
