by Tilda Shalof
“Who can blame him?” Laura said.
“The MRI, the MRI,” said Justine in a mocking voice. “That’s all you ever hear about these days – how long you have to wait for an MRI. You’d think MRIS were saving so many lives. Why is the MRI always trotted out as the gold standard of our health-care system? For God’s sake, when will people realize that it’s not more MRIS we need? It’s more nurses. The ratio of nurses per capita is a far better indicator of the standard of our health-care system than the number of MRIS to go around. If you’re sick, you need a nurse, not an MRI.”
“And whatever happened to the doctors who went into medicine for the love of it?” I asked. “Because it’s their passion? Medicine is becoming a business, and if people choose medicine as a way to make money, they should go to the States because there, health care is a commodity for sale and you can shop around for the best product. Patients are the customers and if you’re rich you get better health care than if you’re poor. In Canada, health care is a basic human right, a service that every human being deserves. Tell me, have any of you ever seen someone get preferential treatment? A Canadian over a non-resident? A white person over one of colour? A VIP over an ordinary citizen?”
“Can’t we have one night out together without talking about work?” complained Laura. “We’ve talked enough about work. Well, what about you, Tilda? What are your plans?”
They would all laugh at me if I told them how much I still loved nursing. How I appreciated the opportunity it afforded me to work equally with my hands and mind, my body and spirit. How I still had so much to learn. How I enjoy the rigour of the shift work, the immediacy of helping people in crisis, the privilege of accompanying people through some of the most difficult moments of their lives, the challenge of the complex cases, and the energizing capacity of this work. I have never wanted to leave the bedside, only now to step away momentarily, take a look around and see it all.
“I’M SO FULL,” said Frances, loosening her jeans as we rolled out of the restaurant after midnight.
“Me, too,” groaned Laura.
“Yeah, but the problem with these all-you-can eat buffets is that a week later you’re hungry again,” Justine quipped.
Yes, finally, we were full.
As we went our separate ways that night of celebration, commemoration, and farewell, I knew we would always be close in heart, if not at hand.
IT WAS JULY and time for a brand-new set of residents, fresh from their intern year to join us in the ICU for a few weeks. One of them, Kendal, had just returned from a mission with Médecins Sans Frontières. Kendal, with her clogs, rumpled chino pants, Sherpa wool sweater, black mailbag across her chest and resting at her hip, and tight curly hair, had just returned from Cambodia and had brought some visiting doctors on a tour of the ICU. They joined us on morning rounds.
“They feel disheartened,” she translated for us. “One of them is saying to me that seeing all that we have here, he doesn’t even feel like a doctor any more. I am telling him that if I went to his country, I wouldn’t know how to treat malaria, land mine victims, malnutrition, dysentery, and leprosy. I don’t have their skills to face what they deal with.”
She listened more and then reported back to us. “They say that it’s not doctors – what they need more than anything is nurses in the Third World countries.” She looked at us.
“Yeah, we could go over there as bedpan teachers,” someone joked.
Still with that! I thought. Have we made no progress?
“Not exactly,” said Kendal. “They need nurses to teach the people, nurses to organize and run clinics, develop immunization programs, offer primary care, teach other nurses there how to do work as skilled as yours.”
THAT DAY I was working with Tikki, one of the nurses who had just joined the ICU. I was supervising her during her last few days of orientation to the ICU. She had a tiny nose ring and spiky purple hair. I’d seen her once early in the morning, dressed in black clothes, coming to work directly from an all-night Goth rave at The Docks. Tikki was a university graduate, new to nursing, even newer to critical care, and she seemed full of confidence and skill. I had no worries about her coping with the ICU.
“How are you doing?” I asked her.
“Great, thanks. No problem.”
“What’s your impression of this place so far? Do you think you’ll like working here?”
She looked thoughtful and paused for a moment before she spoke.
“This is an extreme place,” she said. “It’s very harsh in here, what we do to people … and some of it seems, rather … unwise.”
I nodded. Maybe so, maybe so. After all these years, I’m still trying to sort it out. We all are. But I believe that there is, in fact, a great deal of wisdom in the way we take care of sick people. One thing I know for sure is that at times when our wisdom falters, compassion always abounds. That is what nursing has taught me above all: compassion is the greatest wisdom.
Copyright © 2004 by Tilda Shalof
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or othe reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Shalof, Tilda
A nurse’s story: life, death and in-between in an
intensive care unit/ Tilda Shalof.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-141-2
I. Shalof, Tilda. 2. Nurses – Canada – Biography.
3. Intensive care nursing – Anecdotes. I. Title.
RT37.S53A3 2004 610.73′092 C2003-907296-7
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’ Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
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