I'm Holding Out For A Hero

It's Nurse Appreciation Week. I have no meme to share because none of them capture my sentiment. Not only do I watch my wife struggle each shift to do the best for her patients in the face of insulting pay and administrative neglect, she does it with grace and compassion. Only after she's clocked out do the tears, the anger, the frustration come - but she never lets them see it because it's not their fault. Next to teachers, nurses probably have one of the most thankless and difficult jobs. They suffer more physical injuries than construction workers and I witness this all the time - sore and strained muscles, aching back, headache from low blood sugar because it's hard to get breaks for food. Exhaustion and grief are inherent to the job and yet my wife keeps going. We need the paycheck, but there are plenty of other ways to make money. She also does it because she wants to help people. I wish I had such noble ambitions.

I see it in my nurses as well, here on the HVIC. They hold back tears, collapse into chairs at their stations, long for a small break between cleaning up poop and vomit. I hear the strain in their voices somedays, see the slump of their shoulders and I don’t have to ask - I know they are carrying someone’s burden on their back. Maybe the woman dying down the hall, or the husband who has lingered too long at his wife’s bedside after she’s gone - having to gently ask him to finally say goodbye. They carry my burden - literally, when I leave the unit, dragging my backup equipment through the hospital just so I can get some real coffee or a change of scenery. They carry it when they return from a block of days off and I still sit here without a heart. Their eyes follow my children as they go back and forth, day in, day out, doing their best to endure our time apart. They try to imagine it, and it’s sometimes hard for them to talk about it because it troubles them too, sometimes deeply. They wash my hair, bring me water, change my sheets. My wife does this because she loves me; they do it because it’s what they want to do on this earth as a career, just like her. I don’t understand it. Nurses have saved my life - my wife more times than I can count - from dangerous procedures in ER’s, to meds that would have killed me, to arguing and opposing doctors who thought they knew better but were wrong. Nurses have saved me from A-Fib, walked me through an ablation, multiple swans caths, heart removal, recovery from TAH surgery. They’ve advocated for me, sometimes vehemently, in the face of hostility from doctors and managers. It was a nurse in training who first heard my murmur, a nurse who helped me maintain and stay alive with HCM, located life saving medications when mine were discontinued. A nurse who found a way to keep me medicated while we travelled despite me having no general care doctor or home address. Nurses stood by Perry’s bedside as he died, then kept themselves together long enough to come and tell me. Their own grief surely eclipsed my own, but they postponed it to make sure I was okay. They have pushed and chided me, listened, and endured alongside me for seventeen years. I have the greatest respect for our military and our teachers. But adjectives simply fail me in my attempt to fairly articulate what I have witnessed over these years in the devotion of my nurses, my wife being the chief among them. As much as I hate being sick, I’ve been humbled and awe-struck in the assurance of their care for me, and it has changed me. A yearly celebration of nurses isn’t enough. I don’t know how to say thank you to all of them, or even where many of them are. I just hope that their compassion and ethic has worn off on me, at least a little, and that we all learn to value them more as a society than we do. They are the true heroes.