EVERYTHING BUT THANKLESS

Nobody said it was going to be easy. Work, after all, is work. If it had been easy, it would be a vacation, or a hobby, or that something you surely will be doing if you had a little more luck.

My job is not easy, and I say that with a multifaceted meaning. The days and the hours hold no charm in them. (So you want to have lunch with me? Sure! I'm free a month from now. Oh wait a minute... I'd be working the night before. Shall we make it dinner instead?)

My job absolutely has no trace of glamor in it. I deal with the three P's of humanity... pee, poop,and puke. Colored scrubs... or forget colored... 'scrubs' are the most blessed things that the human think tank has ever conceived of. That it is hardly ever white these days reeks of compassion for us who do our labor donned in them.

In my job, it is a never-ending quest for the new thing, the new trend, the better procedure, the safer practice. To this end, it is a never-ending quest for knowledge and skills. We have to be tested, again and again, even on the things we might have already been doing for the past 5, 10 or 15 years. And no matter how much we may already know, there is always something we still haven't heard of, or done, or experienced. We can never be too smug in a situation where the percentage of error is crucially 0. We are always conscious of the fact that we are dealing with human lives. Ironically, we will never be strong enough or sane enough to keep doing this if we are not able to acknowledge the fact that we are still human after all, and prone to errors. We have to be able to forgive ourselves time and again, and vow to do better the next time around.

I have earlier on made peace with the fact that for so long as I am in this job, I will have to forego spending Christmas and New Year with my family back in the Philippines. It would have been tricky if my husband and I put in a lot of weight to whipping up really grand vacations with stuffed itineraries and travel arrangements that move like clockwork. So we have taught ourselves to be happy with whatever works and well, I think it is a fortunate thing to find out that whatever works actually really works.

There will always be nights when I wish I could just stay home and do the most insouciant, and therefore the most fun things, like cuddling on the couch as Jay and I try our best to empty the tevo to make room for a fresh batch of recorded shows 'for future use.' Or if Jay has something more compelling to do like going for a run under the sweltering sun for instance, there's lots of ways I could entertain myself on the internet..... oh, lots of ways, I got to tell you. These activities help me recharge. They serve as a kind of reset button which fires up flesh, bone, will and sanity so I could deal with the real world with a smile again.

Well, sometimes something like this crosses your path and you don't exactly have the words for it but it sure helps you believe you're doing the right thing...

Jay picked me up from work this morning and on the way home, we stopped by Ralph's, as planned, cause we wanted to grill some pork chops for a late lunch. We were out of eggs too so I went to get some. As I was methodically picking up one egg after the other from a tray, making sure that nothing was cracked or spoiled, a woman came up and picked up a tray herself. We looked at each other and smiled, just two random women recognizing each other for the smart consumer we were. She looked at my green hoodie which identified me as a NICU nurse and remarked, 'You're a nurse at the NICU?'

'Guilty as charged,' I answered with a smile.

That was all she needed. And then she went on to relate how her son was born with a low birth weight and had to spend some time in the NICU, how he had to reach 4lbs. before she could take him home, and how the NICU nurses were the most amazing people she and her son had known.

'Forget the doctors.' she said, ' sometimes they can't even be bothered. You are the ones who are with our babies 24/7 and you never run out of patience and gentleness. We see how you hold our babies and we go home from a visit thinking our little ones will be fine right where they are cause you guys are there.'

I was stunned to silence, not because what the woman was telling me was the great big thing that held the answers to life's biggest questions, but because there was absolutely no prelude to it. I was just there for the eggs. 

I had no idea what hit me but I could only smile in gratitude.