I WAS PONDERING RECENTLY on the people who enter your life – sometimes even briefly – and change you forever.
For me, hands down, it’s nurses.
1972 was a great year for music. Jethro Tull brought out the double album ‘Living in the Past’, and the shortest track, ‘Nursie’, was lyrical.
“Tip-toes in silence ’round my bed
And quiets the raindrops overhead
With her everlasting smile
She stills my fever for a while
Oh nursie, dear
I’m glad you’re here
To brush away my pain.”
In my life, I have had many nurses brush away my pain and fill me with awe.
I think it started with a newly qualified 20-year-old nurse at Auckland Hospital. At age 18, I was knocked off my motorbike. A team of the youngest-looking medics I have ever seen looked at my bloodied, lacerated leg in the ED.
The nurse was a giggler. She laughed when the junior doctor [who didn’t even shave yet] pushed too hard on a syringe and sent a copious gush of anaesthetic into my wound. But she held my hand and told me I was going to be okay. Somehow, there was a knowing, that a gentle touch was all I needed.
My sister-in-law – a fabulous nurse who spent decades on the frontline of international aid work – has been part of my life for 47 years. She took on postings all over the world, looking after kids in disaster zones, among many other successes. I was always moved by what I came to call, in my head, her ‘practical compassion’. She has often been at my side in hard times.
In the mid-nineties, while making a TV series, I met the strongest nurse of them all. A nurse who had one small boy, a baby on the way and – tragically – a doctor husband who ended his own life. I watched this woman for the next 27-odd years. She raised her two boys on her own to see them become incredibly talented and loving young men.
She had a stellar nursing career and inspired so many.
Recently, I learned she was still fighting the good fight – the day I turned up for dinner, she had just beaten off a madman smashing up the clinic where she practices. He took several good swings at her – but nursing, she reckoned, taught her to duck and weave when required.
Lying in North Shore Hospital with a wrecked back about 12 years ago, I was in a ward with crazy people. There was a mad woman who would stand in the ward corridor at 3am, scream at the nurses, and threaten to defecate on the floor.
A little Filipina nurse, probably only five-foot-one, would talk to this woman in a quiet, reassuring voice, calm her down and take her back to bed.
Around this time, there was a protest story on the 6 o’clock news. Nurses were demanding better money and conditions. One lovely nurse told the camera, “I get other people’s blood, vomit and human waste on my hands and clothes every day of my working life. For $40,000 a year. I can’t afford to pay to send my kids on a school trip or buy them McDonalds.”
In 2015, I was seriously ill with liver disease. I was pretty out of it with a related brain condition called encephalopathy. I met many nurses at that time, including another native of the Philippines called Andre, whose job it was to shove enemas up my butt four times a day. He did it with good humour.
There were two Indian nurses who watched me through mad, flailing nights. I was scared. I could see demons and gargoyles coming out of the walls of my hospital room. They took turns sitting next to me for half and hour at a time, holding my hand and promising me, “No, darling, I won’t let them take you off to the dark place. I am here for you.”
In 2017, I had a spell in a couple of half-way houses for people with mental health issues.
On both visits, one other guest there took me under her wing. She felt like something of a guardian angel. On my last day at the second house, I was lying on my bed in what felt like terminal depression. This tall, statuesque woman with a kind face, and clearly on her own journey here, came and stood in my doorway and gave me profound advice and comfort. Like Jethro Tull said, she brushed away my pain. Stilled my fever for a while.
I learned later she was actually a very skilled nurse. We have been friends ever since.
Over the New Year period, I was placed in a secure psychiatric ward for three weeks. I found myself in the company of some prominent professionals, all, like me, needing some attention. Each day I got my own special nurse whose job was kind of guarding me. They asked me two questions as they started and ended their shift – “Have your bowels moved, and do you feel like ending your life today?”
Then, often, they would just hang out with me. One called herself ‘The Entertainer’ and asked me if she was my favourite. That was a contest between her and a beautiful Tongan nurse who treated me like royalty and always seemed to be rushing off to a midnight church service on the other side of town. Another nurse was Lebanese-Palestinian – utterly captivating and kind. Like many of them, a single mum raising kids, always struggling financially.
Watching these nurses in the Psych unit was incredibly moving. It was a ward for Older Adult Mental Health patients. Nice label, huh! Many of the patients were in sad stages of dementia or mentally pretty dinged up, and were mostly non-verbal – sad and shuffling wraiths. The nurses and health care assistants just loved on them all.
These days, I have the honour of working in health communications at a big hospital. There are thousands of nurses – from a former Miss Samoa beauty contest winner … to an incredible family liaison nurse whose neonatal unit cares for about 1300 prem babies a year … to a young woman I know who cries some nights in her car at the end of a gut-wrenching shift in the ED.
In closing, I watched a clip online recently that gave me major eye leakage. It was a true-life encounter between a young nurse and an older woman, Margaret, with terminal liver disease. The woman was distressed, so the nurse was singing to her.
The nurse had learned Margaret’s favourite song – about angels and dancing in heaven, and she got up real close to the dying lady and serenaded her into the next life.
As a writer and filmmaker, I see lots of moving things. But never anything as powerful as this.
The PS to that story is that I shared it with my guardian angel nurse from the half-way house.
“Exactly what I used to do with my dying patients when I was a new nurse at 19,” she told me.
It figures.
“Oh Nursie, dear, I’m glad you’re here!”
ROB HARLEY IS AN AUTHOR, INSPIRATIONAL SPEAKER AND STORYTELLER. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, HE’S A GREAT KIWI BLOKE.
