Timeless Pain
That moment in handover, when I heard my allocated patient list, my heart sank.
I’d worked on that urology ward on previous nursing placements. Many patients came in periodically for surgery, you got to recognize those familiar faces. Almost like a family reunion.
She had a type of tumor that required surgery about every six months just to keep it at bay. I was finally a 3rd year nursing student, so I knew the ropes. I’d requested to have my final placement there and after that I’d get my ‘wings’ as a fletching nurse. I remembered her name. She was just one of those people that just took you down. She was sad, abrasive, unfriendly and always had something to complain about. Nothing was ever good enough, or simply just enough.
I gracefully accepted my patient list for the day and read up on each of their notes, before I got busy. Something felt different this day though and I can’t even really recall what that was. Perhaps, I got my second wind or an extra shot of coffee. I walked into her room with a bowl of water and an armful of linen. “Good morning” I said, “I remember you from last time, my name is Nicky”. She looked up and just stared at me.
Something just clicked in me that day, and I said very confidently “I don’t really know what your problem is, my lovely, but I’m not leaving here until I do”. Ha, I still can’t believe I did that actually, cheeky 21-year-old girl, who the hell did I think I was? But she looked me straight in the eye and replied. And that’s how it started, after ninety minutes, she had told me her story.
“You’ll dislike me even more if i tell you”.
Her story was about when she was my age, she had been planning to marry her childhood sweetheart and then the war happened. She wasn’t angry that he enlisted, she told me they very nearly consummated their relationship before he left. In the end they got engaged, promising themselves that life they wanted would be after the war. That one fateful night, that all changed.
She told me, it just sort of happened, she was lonely, everyone was. The party had a group of stationed soldiers suddenly arrive, and that’s when the ‘real’ party started. She felt giddy from drinks and company, and she lost herself in that one moment of weakness. Riddled with excruciating guilt and remorse she vowed she was never going out like that again, well at least until he was home. Soon after, she discovered her fiancé had been killed in action. The thing was, that she never told a soul what had happened on that night.
Not one single soul.
Life just simply went on. Eventually the war ended, and she met and married a kind man. She had a family but never shook that awful feeling, that if she hadn’t have done that, he would never have died. She ultimately believed she had been punished, and the worst part was, no one ever knew. Her new husband knew and sympathized about her loss, never realizing that she entirely blamed herself. She told me about moments of joy, times in her life when she’d started to forget. But that feeling always eventually came back.
“That’s why I’m so miserable, I’m a terrible person”.
She was a widow now; her children had even become parents. She simply hadn’t forgiven herself. I listened quietly, for a really long time, whilst I bathed her and tended to her personal and surgical cares. And I watched her weep, held her hand whilst she allowed those tears to finally fall.
I thought about myself, the crazy wild parties we regularly had as students, the drinks that flowed, and the casualness of it all. Then I thanked her. I thanked her for trusting me with the heaviest burden of her life.
Ironically, I went to a party that night, and sat most of it out on the sidelines, unusually observing, processing I guess, through a very different lens.
The next day I was working the afternoon shift, she was still on my allocated patient list. The morning staff reported that she was different, nicer, easier. They asked me what had happened, and I smiled, and I said very little, just that we’d ‘hit it off’. Shortly afterwards, I really wanted to go and talk to her. And when I walked in her room, I saw her colour was different. I stood in that doorway and watched her take her very last breath as she died.
She died, I believe, because she had finally let go, after all of those years of suffering, she’d finally spoken her truth. I’m just eternally grateful that she waited for me to say goodbye.
