
I stood by the sink, just to the left of my mom's hospital bed last November and watched as her care team gathered around her, gingerly helping her sit on the side of the bed for the first time in five days.
Those five days had been long, dark and some of the scariest of my life. Teetering on the need for intubation, her lead physician came to my side to start that ever so difficult conversation. Compassion filled his dark eyes and we shared those sacred few moments together. Just how do you determine what a human can or cannot likely recover from? I didn't have to make the decision right then, but he wanted me to think about it. And I did, in every waking and sleeping moment over those next two days.
Thankfully, she was able to recover; her infection subsided, inflammatory markers normalized, and the aggressive antibiotic management of her septic shock, along with the genetically targeted lung cancer medication I carried with me until given the go-ahead to give her that first dose, took effect. She was able to maintain her blood pressure without IV medications, she had less intense oxygen needs and was finally able to truly rest.
That blessed rest also meant she needed to get out of bed and start using her muscles again. How quickly one's body declines when lying completely still. I made sure to stand out of the way; this well-perfected healthcare team was on autopilot and without need for my out-of-practice bedside nursing skills. There were three nurses helping my dear petite mother. One at her head, one at her waist and one at her back. They slowly positioned her on the side of the bed as they allowed her time and space to feel safe as they all three held her.
Once stable for a few minutes, I watched the nurse positioned at my mom's back. I didn't know her even though I had been with my mom all hours except those precious few I would leave to go sleep in our hotel (we were out of town for a Thanksgiving trip during all of this). This particular nurse touched my mom's back and said, "Your skin must be so dry. I am going to get some lotion." She gathered lotion from the hospital basin, held it in her hand, seemed to consider something and disappeared. She returned, speaking ever so tenderly to my mom, and said, "I have that lotion and warmed it so it won't be cold when it touches your skin. Is it ok if I rub it onto your back?"
I watched as this nurse gently smoothed warmed lotion onto my mom's back. As I watched, it was as if time and space stood still and I was almost "out of body". Tears filled my eyes as I considered this nurse's compassion and recognized it as the same compassion that called me to the profession. After several years of hard realizations about the Oz behind the curtain of healthcare, I realized in that very moment that I had fallen out of love with nursing.
It wasn't a cold falling out of love. I still deeply cared about my patients and their families. It was a necessary acceptance type of falling out of love. It was disillusionment. It was accepting hard truths and choosing to live in that reality instead of the alternate one being shoved in my face and touted as, and I quote, "what we do with smoke and mirrors". How could the profession that I counted as a ministry have such dark secrets? It broke me.
And it broke me over and over again. It wasn't just my own experience. It was also my mother's. I watched as the very colleagues I esteemed, carelessly provided the healthcare I feared most from witnessing the messages spoken behind closed doors. I stayed by her side, truly afraid of what would happen to her if I left as her advocate. Another out of body experience of a different kind that also forever changed me.
These truths are hard to write about which is one of the reasons I have not. Not only did I almost lose my mother, I also almost lost my calling as a nurse. So many questions filled my mind throughout my mom's journey to her diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, her ICU stay with severe septic shock and her recovery. Sure, there were questions to God - the usual why questions. But there were also questions of how. How had my beloved profession come to what I witnessed? How was nursing so broken? How was healthcare so callused? Such a machine.
I didn't and still don't know the answers. But I do know that I had a spiritual encounter at Sentara Health in Williamsburg, Virginia that I will never forget. God used my mother's care team there to bring me home to nursing. Her primary doctor, nurse and all of their support staff saw my mother as a human worthy of tender loving care. They also saw me, her primary support person, as a soul equally as worthy of that same care. They used thoughtful communication, care and expertise to bring healing to her body and healing to my heart. I felt more a colleague in a place never before known to me than I did in an institution I had been a part of for over 20 years. And that spoke volumes.
I watched another person that day. She was a member of the custodial staff. She came in, did her daily cleaning and began scrubbing the sink with a hard water stone. She and I had become friendly during my time there and so I asked her what she was doing. She replied, "Well, this is a pumice stone and I am using it to prevent hard water stains from happening. If we do this every day, we won't have hard water stains."
Hard water stains had covered my tender heart. Rather than receiving a pumice stone treatment from my leaders, I endured an accumulation over time of indescribable things, creating a thick layer of hardened muck around my broken heart. All of those things needed to be mourned, which involved acknowledging their truth and reality. It is amazing how easy it is to convince oneself of alternate realities to protect one's heart. That is what I did. Until I could not do it one more day. I got out my own pumice stone and got to work.
Each morning, I immersed myself in the Word of God, embracing His truths to replace the deeply ingrained lies I had believed for years. With each small advance followed by multiple setbacks, I gradually chipped away at the tough exterior of my heart and started to feel once more. I began to embrace myself as the person God made me to be—a deeply emotional, compassionate, honest, and genuinely tender.... nurse.
To God be the Glory. Thank you for transparency, authenticity & being relatable, but most importantly “Our Father” restoring healing, passion & your calling 🙏💕
Everyone’s journey is different but you so beautifully express the calling we, as nurses, responded to in the beginning. This era of healthcare, wrought with pitfalls of fee for service, nursing shortages, quotas, etc and ending with compassion fatigue and burnout….in this era and in this time so many of us needed to be reminded of how it all began.
So powerful, Thank you. I needed this.