I realized that being alive at this time is something that I have to be grateful about. I see that life changes quickly in a stressful way to be fully interacting in a world where people are greatly suffering from all kinds of varied natural and man made adversities. I was assigned in a ward where patients vary greatly in culture, practices, and beliefs. Honestly I am not comfortable to see people lying around waiting for their time. And guess what my first assignment was? I was assigned to a ward where one patient has cancer. It took me a lot of strength everyday to face the patient and to continue caring for him not because I don’t want to care but because I don’t want to watch death working on with people. Life is so precious to me and too beautiful to let me see life creeping out from cancer patients this way. We cannot separate feelings from assignments I have to deal with meeting the eyes of the dead and their pain. This has become an issue for me because I am denying death never accepting it yet and here I am in the midst of the room where a man lays waiting for it.
Caring for this patient saps the life and energy out of me. I don’t know if I can finish my term but I am trying to face the greatest issue of my life – death and its reality. I talk my feelings over and amazingly I was overtaken by the deep wisdom of this man. Death is something that is to be welcome for it takes you away from a world where humans become beast to their children and to their families. Waiting for time get people to look back at the past and contemplate life. What got me is the personal testimonial, the story of his choices and options, the regrets and the failures. It changed my perspective with death it changed my philosophy with life. I succeeded to meet my issues over death by listening and learning from the dying knowing that this knowledge indeed is a tool for my life and a tool for caring and understanding other people’s needs. In nursing you nurse their life and they give you back a piece of their life to live by: meanings.
