Member-only story
It has begun
I’ve been posting mostly calm, no-nonsense stuff about the current realm of unreality we are inhabiting.
Because I’m more nurse than writer. And I just can’t fucking help myself — that’s what we do.
In my current job — as an oncology nurse navigator (think case manager), I literally talk patients and their families off the ledge. Daily. On a really bad day — more than one patient and more than one family.
It’s our superpower. Nurses.
We ARE the calm in the storm.
We hold it together. All. The. Things.
Patients. Families — theirs and ours. Doctors. Each other. Whatever The It might be.
It’s our training. Nursing school not only teaches you how to give a shot. It teaches you how to absorb them too. It morphs us and bonds us. It turns us into someone else. Someone society calls “A Nurse”.
Nursing school is a lot like boot camp — only with meaner instructors. We make life-long friends in that world. Nurses we carry forth with us for the rest of our lives.
Or theirs.
Yesterday, someone I know lost a someone they carried with them.
From that shared hell. In this shared hell.
