nightshiftmom

It’s so fitting that Nurses Week coincides with Mother’s Day. Both immersive identities that challenge and change you and frame your perspective for better and for worse; both entertain a high probability of finding mystery poop on your person. I’m so lucky to be a mom, and to have the mom that I do. I’m lucky to be a nurse. I work every Mother’s Day (night) - it’s an absolute privilege to spend that time with these families. I struggle sometimes with the guilt of having healthy children, amazing parents. I don’t know why I’m so lucky. I hope everyone is grateful for what they have - and for what they don’t have. I hope everyone has a nice day and that they get all the hugs they can handle.

I find myself a half hour deep into a foxhole of a conversation that I’ve had many times already - too many times - with too many worried-sick parents.

This time it’s 3 in the morning, and I’m levelly meeting the gaze of a dad whose name I still don’t know.

I’ve been at this for twelve years, and I’ve learned how to lean into the discomfort. I’ve learned how to let them see my eyes welling up, and I’ve learned how not to flinch, and I’ve learned that all these things are equally powerful in an impossible conversation.

“I keep imagining what’s going to happen if she dies. Is that wrong?”

“No. I should think it’s normal.” (silence, for a heartbeat or two) “...but I can’t imagine that it’s particularly pleasant.”

Around us stand a smattering of younger nurses. None of them parents. None of them know what to do or where to look. None of them seem to be breathing.

“I’m just so scared. I’m so fucking scared. Like, what if this doesn’t work?”

Notably, he’s out at the front desk because his 17-month old daughter had woken up screaming with a gusher of a nose bleed, and now - thanks to a curative cocktail of morphine and assorted blood products - she was all sorted and settled, so he was able to come out to wash himself up.

“Well... it’ll work because it has to.”

“Right. It has to.”

I nod solemnly, with certainty. I know that his daughter has a very poor prognosis and that she is going to suffer terribly over the coming days and weeks. I know it’s incredibly unlikely that she’ll see another Christmas; I also know the limitless power of hope. And while hope and prayers and enough-kumbaya-to-sink-a-ship will not save his daughter, a bone marrow transplant might. Hope won’t save her, but it might help him get forty winks before the next crisis unfolds.

Ten years. That’s how long ago I said “yes” to a surprise proposal that I’d truthfully (read: absurdly) been anticipating every moment of every day for two years already, right up until the afternoon prior.

(NB we got engaged like two weeks after our two year anniversary, which means, yes, I’d been pretty confident about our future for about as long as I’d actually been convinced that we were in fact dating, and that this wasn’t some horrid joke or cruel misunderstanding.)

So this charmingly unromantic man popped the question in a charmingly unromantic way, and five and a half months later I married him. Just in the nick of time, too - and by that I mean a scant year or so before Pinterest found its spot in the sun.

It’s not difficult to be certain when it’s about someone like him. He puts everyone around him at ease. He makes everyone laugh, but I make him laugh the hardest. He doesn’t know how to cry but he understands that I do, and he knows how to help when my tears won’t stop.

(Spoiler alert: turns out they always do, eventually.)

He remains unromantic (perhaps moreso unapologetic but still by all counts charmingly so) and I remain unreasonable (perhaps moreso irascible but still by all counts charmingly so).

This, from my six-year-old daughter.  A solid half hour after we’d said our good-night-I-love-you’s, so she must have known full well: this’d have to be good.

“Does (sic) parents get mad at you when their kid dies?” -Oh, no, Honey.  They know that we worked so hard to take good care when we could.  They’re very sad though. “Are you sad when a kid dies?”

This particular after hours conversation notably taking place on an anniversary.  Nine years earlier, my second-ever favourite patient died.  A year after that, my first-ever favourite patient followed suit.  Same day, different demons.  

Now.   It’s not like we typically pass the time by chatting about pain and devastation and the horrors of it all.  I’m not exactly sure how it is that she could have known that I’d been reflecting on loss and grief and healing, but somehow, nevertheless, she did. She’s just eerily attuned.  Can’t imagine where she gets that from.