The Making of a Nurse by Tilda Shalof

Author:Tilda Shalof [Shalof, Tilda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-257-0
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2007-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

MY UNDERSTANDING of Mrs. Green’s choice helped me accept it. I also had a deeper understanding of Mrs. Ford’s. However, just when I thought I was getting a handle on these complex moral, ethical, and spiritual matters, I heard a story that raised new questions. I was walking past the nurses’ station when Louise saw me and called out, “Hey, Tilda!” Louise must be fifty, but yoga classes and good genes make her look thirty. Petite and delicate, she leaned over the countertop and grabbed my hands with surprising strength. “Have I got a story for you!” Who had time for stories? It was insanely busy and who should know that better than Louise herself who was in charge of the ICU that day? We were short six nurses, and patients were being admitted and transferred out all day. I assumed she would tell me the story later, if we managed to get a coffee break.

“I’ve got to tell you now,” she insisted, pencilling a name in the staffing book and then setting it aside.

I motioned to someone to cover for me, that I’d be back to my room in a minute or two, and leaned over the counter with my elbows resting on the ledge. Louise’s eyes locked with mine and held fast.

“You’ll want to get this down,” she said, her eyes sparkling. She could hardly contain herself.

I reached over the countertop to grab a few scraps of paper that our ward clerk leaves for us to record lab results and telephone numbers. “Shoot,” I said, my pen poised. As she began to speak, it grew quiet around us. Tracy took over Louise’s work for her. Other nurses moved closer to listen and others moved out of the way as if to clear a path for this story to be told.

“Has it ever happened to you, Tilda, that you love a friend’s mother like your own?”

“Yes.” I thought about Bunny, Joy’s mother, and other borrowed mothers, both past and present. I felt a swell of all the mother love they had offered me and all that I felt for them.

“You remember I told you about Alice? She’s my best friend Meredith’s mother. I loved her like my own mother. Last year she was diagnosed with lung cancer and I made a promise to her that I would help her when the time came.” I nodded. “Oh, I wish you had known her! She was brilliant and very strong-minded. She read everything – you’d have loved her, Tilda. But during her last year, she struggled to breathe and couldn’t get around. She had no appetite and lost forty pounds. One day she told me all she wanted was a cigarette, just one. She already had lung cancer, so why couldn’t she have one? She enjoyed it so much. She had a right to that bit of enjoyment, don’t you think?” We nodded and Louise took a deep breath and closed her eyes to help her find her place in the story again.

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