How Could You Do That?

It’s a question I heard at least once a week, if not once a day, while I was fortunate enough to still be working as a nurse in a children’s hospital. My job was officially “Circulating Nurse” in the operating room. That’s actually a pretty good title for it, because as a registered nurse in the OR, you’re literally circulating all the time. Running from this room to that room, from your OR to the instrument room, from the instrument room to the supply core. Constantly on the move. Really, between cutting skin and closing skin, you’re a glorified secretary. Answering calls into the room, calling families and letting them know how their precious offspring were doing, going to get unanticipated supplies and instruments and opening them for the doctor or scrub tech, because when they’re scrubbed in, they can’t touch anything that hasn’t been sterilized.

Before that surgery begins, though, you’re the one who has to take — sometimes pry — that little child away from his or her mommy and daddy and take them back into the abyss. The scary place where your parents can’t go and you have no clue what’s going to happen to you. I always made a habit of spending as much time with my patients as possible before I had to finally separate them from their family. I did this in order to let them get to know me as much as possible in a few minutes. Enough to gain just enough trust to let me take them without kicking and screaming back to their surgery. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t so easy. Sometimes it took every ounce of physical strength I had to get that child back to the operating room because they just were NOT having it. They were NOT willing to leave their mom and dad. So, you get to carry a screaming, flailing child, trying your best to comfort them, all while pushing a big stretcher down the winding corridors with your feet. Oh, and you have to walk while you do this too.

That’s the easy part, though. No, technically it isn’t easy to upset a little kid by taking them away from their parents, but it’s a cake walk compared to reading their histories. Compared to knowing that even with this surgery, they may not survive the cancer we’re going in to try and remove. Compared to fighting the urge not to punch a wall when you find out the precious baby in your arms is having brain surgery because their deadbeat father shook them so hard they broke their collar bone and caused multiple brain bleeds. Compared to fighting the urge to look up the parent who brought their child to a random parking lot at three in the morning while they meet up with their gang and somebody ends up shooting at someone else, and the bullet misses its intended target and hits that baby in the head instead. Yes, when you compare carrying a distraught child to surgery to those things, it’s pretty darn easy.

As an operating room nurse, I’ve literally seen, heard, and smelled it all. The job is hard, it’s dirty, and it’s draining. Hence the “How can you do this job every day?” questions. The answer is simple. Somebody has to. For you to ask me that question shows me that you couldn’t do it. I do it because I can. Because I get to give some attention and love to a precious kid who doesn’t get it at home. I get to comfort a crying baby who may not live long enough to celebrate his first birthday. I get to give comfort. I get to give love. Does it mean it’s easy? Never. Yes, there are better days than others. Days where all our surgeries ended up helping the child, letting you go home knowing that a few kids are going to live normal, healthy lives and you had something to do with that. Is it always that easy, though? No. Not at all. There are kids I still think about to this day — kids I cared for years ago — and wonder if they lived or died. If they found a home they deserved, where they were cared for and loved. There were days I went home and sat staring into space, distraught over the cases I’d seen that day. There were other nights I went home and openly wept for hours on end.

Being a nurse is hard. Being a nurse for children is REALLY hard. Why do I do it? Because I’d rather have the chance to give those poor kids a little love, right when they needed it most, than to not have done it at all. Seeing the smiling faces of a kid who recovered from a devastating car accident, a baby who beat their cancer, or a deaf kid hearing their parents voices for the first time when their cochlear implant was switched on. That’s why I did it. That’s what makes all the tears and heartache worth it. THAT’S why I do it.