Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 75

Physicians see their hospitalized patients for five to ten minutes a day. Nurses assume life-and-death responsibility for those same patients for eight or ten or twelve hours straight.

Many times I have visited in the homes of parents whose child died. As I heard them relive that awful loss, they often singled out a competent and compassionate nurse as their only positive memory on the worst day of their lives:

“I saw the nurse wipe a tear from her eye.”

“The nurse mopped our child’s brow and held his hand until he took his last breath.”

“The nurses taped messages above our child’s bed like, ‘I prefer to be called Cookie’ and ‘Yes, I would love a foot massage’ and ‘Please wind my music box.’”

“The nurses stayed with us long after their shift was over.”

“Except for the way the nurses took care of our emotional needs, I don’t know how we would have made it through.”

“Six of those nurses took a day off without pay and drove all the way down here for the funeral.”

One woman whose grandbaby was born premature and spent three months in the neonatal intensive care unit addressed this poem to the nurses of the unit and tacked it on their bulletin board: “To My Nurses. Tiny / Fragile / Born too soon / Surrounded by machines / Invaded by tubes / You—you saw underneath it all—Me! / And because you / Worked and hoped / Worked and cried / Worked and prayed / And worked / I am!”

Good nurses do much more than tend to physical needs. They dispense tender, loving care to patients and their families. That alone sometimes keeps hope alive.