The hands and feet and hearts for healing.
‘When you enter the hospital, you place your modesty in a little bag and leave it by the door. Then you pick it up when you go home.”
Fr. Robert Barron — the rector of Mundelein Seminary, 40 miles north of Chicago, and founder of an evangelical outlet called Word on Fire — quoted his mother in a recent reflection on his own unexpected stay in “Hospitalland.” Perhaps you’ve been there too? Or had to leave a loved one at a place where, as he wrote, “You are only vaguely aware of the movement of the sun across the sky, and people come barging into your room as regularly at two in the morning as two in the afternoon.”
You try to stay aware, to pretend that life goes on, even as life’s going on may be quite uncertain. The most accomplished people, the most independent, are humbled and humiliated.
And the nurses make all the difference.
“They run the place,” some people tell me. If only! They tend to have at least one more patient each than they should. But they’ll get there, and they’ll focus, and that presence can mean so much in those huge gaps between tests and rare doctor visits.
Nurses restore a sense of human dignity. They celebrate accomplishments; they remind their patients that they are loved.
Nurses restore a sense of human dignity. They celebrate accomplishments; they remind their patients that they are loved. Even when no one comes to visit. Even when the patients feel the world has left them behind. Even when they have gotten to the point where they want it all to end.
Spending the last week in this Hospitalland existence as an observer, I started asking around so as to be able to offer a quick word of thanks to the people who can make the unbearable bearable — and can even bring on a laugh or a smile when there really seems to be nothing to laugh or smile about.
Will tells me: “The best nursing quality that I’ve ever encountered was that exhibited by those who treated my then-elderly (now deceased) grandparents in various stays in hospitals and rehab facilities. Those nurses chose not to yell at my grandparents as if they were deaf imbeciles, but instead treated them with dignity and respect by assuming they had the cognitive ability (which they did until the last day) to understand their questions and requests. Nothing exemplifies the opposite of this virtue more than a nurse who treats an elderly person like an idiot who needs to be coddled.”
Lori writes: “My surgical nurse who comforted me post–C-section operation. She looked at my file, and noticed that I had lost my first pregnancy at 20 weeks. She held my hand and prayed with me about our daughter’s life and the life of our newly born son. Her comfort to me while I waited for hours to meet our son post-surgery gave me a forever peace. That she honored our daughter’s life was remarkable.”
Lori continues: “Michelle, my nurse in the maternity ward, knew I was desperate to see my son after my C-section. Though I was supposed to wait until 7 p.m. (a full 12 hours post delivery), she took me down at 5 so that I wouldn’t get caught in the shuffle of shift changes. She was an angel.”
On a more sober note, Marc writes: “My daughter is a nurse. While working in a world-famous clinic where the byword is ‘The patient is always right,’ she was incensed to be written up for bringing a patient a Sprite when the woman had requested a Diet Sprite. Sadly, most of the letters that nurses receive are negative. Sure, if they screw up and endanger your recovery, roast ’em. But when they perform a difficult job cheerfully and competently, give them praise where it will do some good: in writing to their supervisor.”
Gratitude. If a nurse made a difference in your life or the life of someone you love, say “Thank you.” Say thank you as a general rule. Could we ever do that enough?
Katrina tells me: “My late ex-mother-in-law was a nurse. She was an LPN, but because it was very hard to get people to work the midnight shift, she was the midnight supervisor at the nursing home where she worked.”
Katrina explains: “There were always stories about nursing assistants calling in sick, to the point that she was doing the work of two or three people. And there were stories about the funny antics that patients who are too old to care about what people think can get up to. But the stories that affected me most were about dying. Nursing-home nurses see a lot of dying. Linda called her patients ‘my little old people.’ She loved them.
“More than once she came home very late from work. She explained to us: She usually knew when someone was about to die. She’d call the doctor and the next-of-kin. Sometimes, too often, the relative would decline to come to the nursing home. Linda would sit with the dying man or woman, even long after her shift ended, until they passed, because she did not want them to die alone. Nursing takes an incredible strength of spirit. I couldn’t do it.”
I am reminded of a formerly homeless man whom Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York met at a home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, who care for the elderly poor. “They make me feel like a king here,” the man told Dolan.
This is how so many of us believe God created us: to love and be loved. A good nurse shows us this often in the most miserable of situations.
In his meditation on his own hospital stay, Fr. Barron wrote: “We become sick; a loved one dies suddenly; we lose a job; a much-desired position goes to someone else; we are unfairly criticized; we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in the valley of the shadow of death. These experiences lead some people to despair, but the spiritually alert person should see them as a particularly powerful way to come to union with God.” Nurses can be angels showing the way to this peace. Even as we hate where we are, the gratuitous love of an overworked vessel of compassion can soften a wounded or hardened heart and show the way to hope.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow of the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. This column is based on one available exclusively through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.