INTRODUCTION
Of course, it all began again.
We nurses got together again, and again. Our lives changed and we got a few more wrinkles and a few more aches and pains, but we were still the same. As we talked, we grew. We shared troubles and we stretched. Our minds and our hearts stretched and grew.
We also became patients, some of us. I had been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma in a mole on my left ankle in 1990. Six years later it recurred in a lymph node in my groin, which meant surgery in May of 1996. Then it recurred again, the following April in my spine, which meant surgery for the removal and repair of a vertebrae. That whole story runs through this book as kind of an ‘everywoman’ story, because what happened to me and my family, good and bad, is so much like what happens to thousands of other families when serious disease strikes.
The lessons come hard sometimes, to all of us. We had to learn to let people take care of us, which is the hardest lesson of all. Caregivers became care takers, learning to take care of ourselves. We had to learn to let it be. We had to learn to let grief come and go and wait for the sun to come out.
Sometimes we were surprised at what the world put in our hands, and called each other and said ‘is this the next place? This terrible hard place?’ Then was some comfort in telling about it, in writing quick little e-mail notes in the middle of the night, knowing that there would be no ringing phone but just a little message in the morning. And through it all, through the wounded, helpless feelings, we managed to work, we were still on duty.
It was that duty that kept us going. It was the sense of work, of worth, of just plain defiant stubbornness, that kept us going.
We also called and talked about the good times, the happy times. ‘Here’s a fun place, a granddaughter who laughs all the time; watching a horse run around a paddock., Christmas with a three year old.’ To have the pleasant moments, the smiling children, the riding lessons, the holidays, we learned that we had to accept the others, the darker ones. .
“I knew that!” one of us wailed one day. “I know you have to take the bitter with the sweet, but there is too much bitter today!” and the comfort wrapped around her, for it was her turn. Sometimes we had to learn lessons that we thought we had already learned, already put aside as completed. Grief added upon grief, the loss of a dear sister during a chemotherapy treatment, the sudden call in the night, those were what the dark moments were made of. Those were the hardest times. But we stayed together, and now we have more stories to tell. We’re back on duty. Come and listen again; hold our hands and listen.