Don't Forget the Wounded
My nurses are really very good. They stick a needle in your arm, draw blood and have it out almost before you know it. I've become friends with several of them. I was something of a curiosity at first, because apparently the veins in my arms go crosswise instead of lengthwise. I'm not sure what, if anything, that means, but they seemed interested.
I was in this morning for bloodwork. They always draw blood into a couple of color-coded tubes. About an hour later, I'm given a printout with numbers that I really don't understand. I usually just ask my chemo nurse if there's anything to worry about.
I was talking with the nurse who drew my blood this morning. It was the usual: complaining about the heat, traffic and all that. But then she said that she was going to a meeting where, for the first time, they were going to offer counseling to the nurses.
She said that it is so hard for them because they lose virtually all of their patients. They only deal with cancer patients. She said that one man came in yesterday who was her age. She started to cry. It was worse a couple of years ago, she said, when the sadness and grief became almost too much to bear.
I've wondered about this a lot. The nurses and doctors do so much to try to save cancer patients even when they know that in most cases, it's a losing battle. They make friends with patients only to lose them, but then they are replaced by new patients, and new ones after them as the cancer epidemic just continues to roll.
How do they deal with it? How are they able to get up each morning and come to work? I don't know. I don't know where they get the strength.
I guess like any other war, when we talk about the war on cancer, we tend to focus on the fatalities. But like any other war, we need to make sure that we don't forget the wounded.
6:34 AM ET | 07-24-2006 | permalink
