squid

I agree with you. We should care enough not to intentionally hurt someone. Saying kind words to a person especially to a family member is therapeutic & liberating. When I get angry, I try to be still & embrace my emotions, consciously avoiding a confrontation. Lest I forget that I am human, I sometime fail. Life teaches us a lot of things. Vital is our capacity to love.

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 9th 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.