BY SAMMY JULIAN
NURSES are very special kind of people. If there are men and women exposed to human suffering in the duration of their required working hours, it’s the nurses, be it in the hospitals, in battlefields and war-torn areas and in dialysis centers where agonies and pains of the human body are more pronounced.
In the comforts of high-tech medical facilities or government hospitals in third world countries reeking with the smell of garbage and cockroaches, affliction is the great equalizer as hundreds of patients lay in waiting for healing or their trip to kingdom come.
At the helm of these medical institutions are the nurses who carry the burden of caring for the sick and the infirm, from a fragile baby to an old, gnarled patient, from the benign cases to the terminally ill, from the rich who have so much to spend and would want to pour all his wealth to ease his suffering, to the very poor who doesn’t have a dime to pay for the alleviation of his suffering.
When you are in a profession where you do not only witness in all your working hours human bodies racked in pain but also the poverty that go in partnership with the sickness of a patient, then you must be made of sterner stuff.
But what makes a nurse more special than the other noble professions which also demand the same sacrifice and effort in making this world a better place to live in? It is the exposure to pain and human suffering.
It is their training that has only one central purpose – to treat the wounds inflicted on the human body (caused by disease, physical conflicts, accidents and many more) and be part of the healing process.
It is to bring comfort to the weary and tired souls. And be a guardian to the sick and the infirm. What could be a more noble calling?
Florence Nightingale said, “Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is having to do with a dead canvas or a dead marble compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God’s spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.”
But then, just a sad commentary on the state of nursing in the Philippines: Our schools churn out nurses as fast as a meat grinder can spew out minced meat. It became the course of choice not for humanitarian purpose but for greener pastures abroad.
But the dream of dollar-earning jobs fizzled out and a corrupt government with an inept health program drove hundreds of nursing graduates to call centers because it is where they can survive.
Still, many go for greener pastures abroad because they don’t get the pay they deserve from the health institutions. Our own health services suffer because we lack the blueprint of a genuine pro-people health care and its massive government support that will keep our nurses but with the appropriate salaries like the ones they pay abroad.
But still, those in the forefront have kept to their calling. We have, for instance, the dialysis nurses who man the various dialysis centers in the country. Dialysis nurses are specially trained and have to undergo months of specialization before they can be considered as such. It is a highly technical job combined with the skills of the hands that have passed thru hard tests of expertly inserting needle to the veins of a dialysis patient and monitoring every reaction, indicators and abnormalities. It is a highly specialized field.
Kidney disease is on the rise and renal centers have increased in number, including hospitals.
We have seen how these nurses work. They do not only demonstrate proficiency in their skills but are in complete touch with the feelings and discomfort of their patients and know how to address these far deeper agony of the mind and spirit.
And that makes it more difficult. Because human as they are, they somehow get attached to their patients who may be under their care for years. A kidney patient does not leave the dialysis center. He will be periodically returning there all his life unless he gets a successful kidney transplant or until he expires. That is the real sad story.
One dialysis nurse working abroad made this remark: “I pray that they don’t die in my hands.”
She was saying this after she got the news that a patient she left in good and stable condition died. She was devastated and could not get over the depression easily. And because she could not do anything anymore, not even to whisper goodbye. She could only cry.
We have witnessed many touching and as well dramatic interludes in the somehow placid and comfortable dialysis centers where the boredom is interrupted by the beeping of the dialysis machine. Nurses fast as birds fly to the direction of the sound which indicates that something is wrong, and fix it in a jiffy.
On one occasion – the birthday of a patient – from out of nowhere dialysis nurses brought a cake and sang a birthday song around the patient’s chair. The man was hardened and had accepted his fate with stoicism. For he once remarked, “when it’s your time, it’s your time.” But you can see in his eyes that the moment brought him immeasurable joy. And in other patients’ eyes, a glint of a tear drop.
So out of the bondage of the human ailment, debilitating or curable, festering or superficial, devastating or tolerable, a nurse will hover about you to touch your shattered hopes, help sweep away some the shards of agony, and give some light to your darkened mind.
They would because they know how. Their voices were polished to soothe, and their hands to ease the aches, because that is their calling. But when all alone, in the solitude of their rooms, they, too, would cry for you and share your burdens in their innermost feelings. For as they have touched your lives, their lives have also been touched by you.
Donna Wilk Cardillo, in her “Daybook for Beginning Nurses”, says, “When I think about all the patients and their loved ones that I have worked with over the years, I know most of them don’t remember me nor I them. But I do know that I gave a little piece of myself to each of them and they to me and those threads make up the beautiful tapestry in my mind that is my career in nursing.”
That probably defines one of humanities’ greatest blessings – the nursing profession./PN
