Nurse

Last weekend my daughter took a three-day break from her job as a home health-care nurse. She works hard, caring for a number of people who are almost invisible to the rest of us. They all have health problems far greater than our headaches and elevated blood pressure readings, scrapes and head-colds. To her family and friends, they are nameless and have no addresses, known only to us as “a client” in one town or another in this vast area we call The North Country. They must live in urban locales too, where city nurses change their dressings, give their daily enemas, administer their drugs and treatments and at times provide their one link to the world beyond a bedroom or hospital bed installed in a living room or den. She has kept them alive, and sometimes she has seen them die. She has seen the best and the worst of families, of humanity, and she must wonder at the unfairness of life.

My daughter took a three-day break from her job, and during what might have been a wonderful time with her son and companion, she suffered a medical calamity and was taken by local rescue squad to the nearest hospital. Preliminary tests are encouraging, but she doesn’t yet know how her life may be impacted by this illness.

My prayer for her is that the medical people treating her will be the kind of loving and caring doctors and nurses that she herself is. She deserves no less. And of course I want her to be all right. I love her very much.