There's a lot of love in a hospital

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!

1. "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."
2. "She was a roadie with my rock band in the 70's ... that band was terrible!" 
3. "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."