First off - I'm very sorry for being so bad at posting up until now!
But here I am all the same - I'm still on placement at the moment, and despite the tiredness and finding it hard to be apart from all my family I'm loving it. Which I think can generally be taken as a good sign! Someone, a non nurse, asked me what's the best thing about working in a hospital - which is a hard question, because working in a hospital is such an odd thing.
Being a nurse is hard to describe, but working in a hospital? Much much harder! So what is it like - well - it's lovely, I imagine that it's akin to working in a hotel or airport - you see people, for a moment in their lives. Depending on where you work - it could be their first breath, their last breath, a one off visit, or one of many - but either way you'll see their life in all it's gory details, families under stress, utter joy, heart break - the whole shebang!
But most of all I see a lot of love, when people come to my current ward for surgery - they're stressed and scared - quite understandably - as are their family. And it's in this snap shot that you see raw emotion and true love. When I admit a patient for surgery and see their friend, their parent, child or spouse say goodbye, see them crying or just having a silent hug I know that what they have really is love, it's the tie that bonds and that can't be broken. I'm not naive - I'm not for a moment suggesting that no-couple has ever broken up after going through something like surgery. But that true love that I see then, it may fade it may not, it may even go - or it may stay, but the love in that moment - that love that covers all relationships - and is all consuming - that cannot be broken. It's a little like the opening scene of Love Actually, attached below if you haven't seen that scene!
I often ask people how they met their husband or wife, I think it puts them at ease and makes them forget about being scared of the surgery: so here I have my top 3 favorite answers!
- "I was playing tennis with an friend in 1936 while I was on holiday in Wales, and this beautiful girl walked past the court, I turned to my friend and said what a pretty girl I had just seen, and he told me that the girl was his sister."
- "She was a roadie with my rock band in the 70's ... that band was terrible!"
- "We were both in the Gilbert and Sullivan society at university, but he didn't notice me, so I joined the ballroom dancing society and spent a long time trying to become his dance partner."
