Haunted by a shadow

Spirituality transcends race & religion. It is creatively expressed in many events. As nurses, we are faced with personal encounters of man's mortality. These events may challenge and nourish our spirituality. Our practice is a venue for the diversity of human faith. The lives that occupies the hospital beds could affect us profoundly, personally & spiritually.

I became a nurse because I wanted to remember my mother's battle with stomach cancer. I was 15 when she succumbed to her illness- after months of being bedridden. Her cries of pain wakes me in the middle of the night, her moans of struggle would linger with me as I attended my high school classes. I can vividly smell her 'sick environment'; a heavy mix of medications, vomits, gastric wastes & local herbs. Sterile and putrid.

Her death became my impetus for doing nursing. It defined my spirituality. In the years that followed, I re-lived these scenes and scents in the patients that I have taken care of.

How many deaths have I witnessed?

How much pain did I share? How many families & relatives have I talked to?

How many shaky hands have I touched?

It was countless, immeasurable & un-definable. All I know, the spirit that moved me to pursue nursing - also survived me through the bleak, scary, difficult, helpless & confusing shifts of my practice.

Death has impacted my faith more than anything else in my life. Death has embroidered a tapestry of faces & events in my memory. Let me recall some.

A child comatose from meningitis with a rosary placed near his head.

The infant, whose mother unplugged him because of bloated hospital bills.

A 16- year old girl with pseudomonas infection asking for a coffee candy on the day she died.

A ten-year old boy who was ran over by a truck and whose mother is working overseas caring for somebody else's child.

A 41- year old woman, bleeding heavily from aborting her 9^th pregnancy with a straightened metal hanger.

These hospital scenes hardly describe my daily dose of challenging instances. I have learned to trust my clinical judgment. I relied on my experiences for the sensitivity and the caring attitude. I stayed faithful to the movement of the spirit to breeze me through the diverse & unique encounters with patients and their cases.

Nursing taught me to learn from the patients who were my teachers. The hospital became a field of opportunities for my critical learning. It sustained my spirituality. It sustained my career. It nourished me.

Death is a shadow that empowers me to keep my faith in humanity. Death keeps me grounded on my real motivation for doing nursing- which is caring. Death moves us to get out of our orthodox world. It moves us, nurses, to be unconventional.