Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On being a nurse

2001; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1067/men.2001.113193

1527-2966

Darlene Glover,

Nursing Education, Practice, and Leadership

Nursing produces knuckle-whitening, pulse-racing, palm-sweating fear on a regular basis, no matter how “seasoned” we are: when your blood pressure is falling and the intravenous start depends on our expertise...when the man with crushing chest pain is you, my neighbor...when the baby is coming and the doctor has not yet arrived. You will look at us with trusting eyes and ask if you are going to die; we will meet your eyes and answer, “Not on my watch.” We will hold your hand as you view your son’s broken body and beg him not to leave, although you know he already has. We will weep with you for all the broken, unsalvageable sons and we will silently curse our dead-of-the-night phone calls that change your sleep forever. We will accept your howls of protest at your too-warm room and your too-cold soup and recognize that you are protesting your terminal prognosis at the age of 39 years, or the cruelly unfulfilled promise of motherhood, or the permanent loss of body symmetry you have known since puberty. While your physician cures your disease, we will care for your body, your mind, and sometimes, your soul. In the deep of the night, we will hear your confessions and seal our lips in the light of day to all you have confessed. We will pray with you and for you, even if our beliefs differ. We have seen people die despite our best efforts and live against all odds; we know that what we do is not all there is to healing. We will treat you with respect, although you remind us of alcoholic uncles or abusive ex-husbands or the school bully who plagued us until we moved away. We will do so because you are someone else’s uncle or someone else’s husband and they care about you, or because no one cares for you at all. When duty calls, we will rise from our Thanksgiving table or warm bed to see you safely to another hospital, and while the sirens wail above our heads, we will whisper softly about all the reasons to hold on...such as Thanksgiving dinner and your own warm bed. We will hold your fragile, elderly body when your relatives have abandoned you to your dementia; we will tell you it is okay to let go and follow the light. We will hold your battered body and remind you that you are blameless. We will hold your tiny babies as small as our palms and urge them to live. Sometimes we will hold each other. We will laugh at macabre jokes that make our nonclinical co-workers blanch and leave the cafeteria table. We may, on occasion, seem overly joyous and oblivious to your pain while attempting to hide our own. We are, after all, human. It is our humanness that allows us to care for you. It is also our greatest vulnerability. We will tend to your open sores and your infectious coughs and your unidentified rashes and hope that our personal protective equipment is all the manufacturer promised. We will try not to think of the ramifications of tuberculosis, HIV, and hepatitis B, C, and D to our futures and to our families. Instead, we will scrub our hands a thousand times a day and wear bleach like the finest perfume. We will teach you all about nutrition and good cholesterol while drinking too much coffee and eating too many delivered pizzas that turned cold while we answered yet another call for help. And when our day or evening or night is over, we will walk our callused feet down the hall and out the door...but we won’t go alone. You will go with us...your agonies and your joyful recoveries, your tearful good-byes and your jubilant reunions, your disappointments, and your great courage, your human failures and your newfound faith. You will go with us...always.