When you finally realize that your mom was right.

Mothers are the sweetness of life. Well they can be, if you get a good one in life’s haphazard lottery of genetics, and let me tell you I got a good one. Is she crazy? Well absolutely, and we don’t always see eye to eye. Partially because I am two inches shorter than even the shortest person in my family, but also because when I was a child, my mother taught me something important. That I was not stubborn and willful as others would have interpreted my undeniable inability to let go of what I wanted. No my mother would say, in her sing song way, “Don’t call her stubborn, call her determined.” That very thing has given me the courage to believe and do what I know to be right. Mothers teach their daughters that they can be whatever they want to be. Mine added on to this and spoke truth only visible through squinted mother eyes over me from the very beginning. 

They teach and they care and they clean up after us, emotionally and physically. My mother is no  saint, but whenever I needed her she was there. Once she drove all the way to downtown Long Beach to pick me up after a midnight movie premier that I had spent puking my guts out in, at 2 am. My mother, the woman with all the words, no questions asked, she was there for me that night and has been there ever since. 

I have only been a nurse a short while and though I care for my patients well, I have never made the parallel between it and motherhood before. Being an ICU nurse has never been about those things to me; it’s a nurturing profession but it lacks the softness and longevity of motherhood. Yet, I can’t help but see the many things my mother has taught me about life and how to be my very best self, in my everyday work. Being a nurse is exhausting, but perhaps the hardest thing is when you relate too well to the patients. I have told you about one mother, now let me tell you a story of another. 

This patient entered my life at the beginning of one of my early shifts as an ICU RN. I was working nights for the first time consistently and they had left me grumbling. This patient had a name and a past, but I will spare you the gory medical details, just know she was a middle aged woman who had for a  long time suffered terrible joint pains that left her in a wheelchair most of the days. She came to the hospital because of large sores that has developed on her stomach due to complications of her condition. Meanwhile, an infection set in and by the time she made it to me in the ICU, her organs were beginning to show the strain of the advanced infection. 

        My patient deteriorated every night I saw her, becoming more and more unaware of her surroundings. This woman had a daughter a few years younger than myself. She was mature beyond her age and acted as the soul mediator for her mother and her father, as most of her family members did not speak English. This young woman was the voice of this family. I enjoyed talking to her, updating her on her mom’s condition and asking her about school, and what her semester would look like when she finally went back to college. It was seeing this sleep deprived girl leave her mother's side one night telling me that she was going to go home and sleep because she knew her Mom was in good hands, that changed the way I thought and felt about being a night shift nurse forever. 

I had given her something to hold onto, someone to trust, someone she knew would be honest. Therefore it was all the more painful when she looked me in the eyes one day and asked,

 “You see patients like my mom every day, do you think she has a chance? Do you think she will die here?”  

I wish I could tell you my answer was better, that it was life shatteringly hope-filled or bluntly prophetic. It was probably a watered-down version of what she had been telling herself everyday while her mom slipped away from her on an aging white hospital bed, “...one day at a time, hope is always a good thing, just have to stay positive…”

When my patient’s heart stopped one week later, I wasn’t there to be part of the team that tried to resuscitate her and I wasn't there to say goodbye, not to any of them. But I remember them, this patient in particular, because on that day when I spoke to her daughter I was not just a nurse I was a daughter looking in the eyes of another daughter and wishing her mom to be well and knowing how desperate I would be if it had been me in her place. One day I will be a totally competent nurse, I will know every drug by name, I will anticipate orders before doctors have to open their mouths, and I will know just what to say. But today I am a good nurse because I understand, truely, what it means to care for a patient as if they were my own loved one. Mothers are universal. Not good mothers I am afraid, but mothers in some shape or form.We cannot get by without them. They are our heartbeat and they are the voices in our head when we are most exhausted, telling us whatever it was they have told us our whole lives. At nights in the hospital,  when my body is failing me and coffee is also failing me, and my emotions are strung out and my soul weary, and when I will think to myself, just maybe I am not cut out to be a nurse,’ I hear my mother’s voice inside my head, “Call her determined.”