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Except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

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August 19, 2016

Where Does It Hurt?

Brooklynn and Olive, ready to operate

Brooklynn and Olive, ready to operate

“Where does it hurt?”

My hip, I told the doctor, placing my hand on my right leg.

She paused, then said, “Let me look in your mouth.”

I smiled at the paper towel taped over my doctor’s nose and mouth and the roll of tape tied to the top of her head. Health care really has plummeted, I mused. The doctor is my six-year-old granddaughter, Olive.

The hip really is sore, as it should be. My husband drove me down to North Carolina ten days after hip surgery and left me here for a month to recover. Perhaps he knows what I intuitively reached for: the healing power of grandchildren.

Even in 96-degree heat, I could feel the healing begin when one-week-old Leo was laid in my arms, still unfurling from the womb, pure and sweet as heaven’s breath. I don’t think I realized how tired and frayed I had become until I leaned my head out of the car window and inhaled the lovely crape myrtle blossoms as the cicadas sang. It was soothing, like a cool washcloth on a fevered forehead. Then a newborn, pure as the Carolina rain, life unwrapped and a child of my child! My heart kicks and sputters and begins to beat again. I find a path, a bit overgrown, and turn towards home, my eternal home.

Kairos: a Greek word meaning the right time, the opportune moment. The implication is a window opened by God Himself, saying “This way.”

Sometimes it takes a six year old to show me. Or my two year old grandson running through a sprinkler as he looks back at me.

“C’mon, Ama, c’mon,” he says. And I stretch to my feet and pretend to run after him, carefully skirting the falling drops. Eli knows and stops, pointing to the sprinkler, to the spray of water. His brow dips as he repeats, for clarity,

IMG_5335

Eli with new bro, Leo

“C’mom Ama!”

Okay. I run through the sprinkler, letting the water fall on my clothes, my hair and face. I don’t feel six, but I remember it now, screaming through the frigid arc of the garden hose, the sweat mixing with the water, the grass slick and cool under my feet. I remember joy. Kairos.

I have been forgetting things. Where I put my glasses and shoes. Whether I took Tylenol or not. Did I turn the coffee off? My keys, phone, my joy, my Jesus. Life somehow became something to do, not live. I lost gratitude, I lost balance.

Last week my son and his wife took me out to the Smokie Mountains for my first time ever. We arrived late in the day, but not too late to get in some tubing on a local river. Charcoal clouds hovered over the green mountaintops suggesting a storm, but we went anyway.

I think I found my favorite “sport” ever. Okay, floating on an inner tube down a mostly lazy river with a few riffles and rocks doesn’t sound like an Olympic feat. But you do have to walk a lot to get there and if you’re stupid like me and jump off the tube to push away from a rock, realizing quickly that the current is stronger than you are and maneuvering back onto a tube is about as graceful as a hippo on a balance beam – well, it’s a real work out.

But I learned something. If you lean back in the tube, looking up at the treetops and the sky, and tuck your legs up into the tube, you drift like a fallen leaf, easily navigating the current as you bounce and twirl beneath the drifting clouds, light dabbling your face, the water. Lovely. I learned this from watching Olive, who weighs just a touch more than a leaf.

After my doctors, Brooklynn and Olive, fixed my leg, they woke me up from surgery (I think I fell asleep) and informed me I needed a heart operation now. Brooklynn now wore the scrubs and Olive had changed into a dress with large pink and gold dangling earrings, and held a notebook and pen. She told me she was the doctor’s assistant.

“Your heart thing is too slow,” Brooklynn said.

“How bad is it?”

Olive gave me a thumbs down and I smiled, picturing the stern cardiac surgeons I know using this gesture instead of stumbling over their improvisation of the same thing. “But we can fix it,” I was assured.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28 KJV

 “C’mon, Ama!” I hear the sweet voice of a two-year-old. He does not see me as too old, too tired or too busy. C’mom! And get all the way in too. There you will find rest, you will find healing – you will find you were made for that place.

Every morning I work, I sit in the parking lot with a cup of tea and pray. In the winter it’s dark, with the sun hinting of a new day to the east, splashing the sky on the horizon with strokes of fire. In the summer, I can watch the cranberry bog before me come alive as the morning stirs God’s creation. And I try to remember to pray this:

“Thank you for this day. I rejoice in you Lord!” I think God likes to hear this from us, before we are swept into the undertow of measured time and happenstance. But lately it has become rote and Hail Mary-ish. As soon as rejoice leaves my lips, my mind reaches for joy, something I used to know, a free and glorious gift, defiant of circumstance. Yet as the day unfolds, it eludes me, and I am disturbed by my aloneness. It had become my strength, my way. The spontaneous joy found only within the mystery of the Kairos moment was missing. No wonder I was looking forward to surgery.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. Ecclesiastes 3:11

 I am learning, again, the need to put my time, every moment, in the capable hands of a sovereign God. And to pull my legs up and float, face to the sky, eternity in my heart, carrying the sound of the river coursing over rocks with me through each day into the night.

 Thanks, Brooklyn and Olive, for the heart surgery; Eli, for not letting me pretend and Leo, for reminding me that life is precious, it is now and forever; it is the way everlasting.

 

 

Smokies

Smokies!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Faith, Hope, Redemption Tagged: grandchildren, Smokies, surgery
9 Comments

July 20, 2016

Old Nurses Never Die; They Just Have Surgery

Left on the whiteboard by an elderly patient I cared for.

Left on the whiteboard by an elderly patient I cared for.

Robin. I had penned the letters over silk tape and stuck it to a locker 7 years ago. I caught the corner and pulled it off, closed the empty locker door and headed out, taking one last look at the small break room.

The room is tucked away, off a hallway used by everyone from Risk Management to Interpreters to Float Pool, but is seldom used at all. There’s no TV in it; just a small table and 3 chairs. But it’s a room I’ve used every work-morning to pray in, as I watch the steady flow of workers crossing the parking lot and the sun edging up over the bog. I slow myself down, making sure Jesus leads before I jump into the unknown world of the sick or injured. The room also provided a small respite at many lunch breaks, allowing me to reflect in silence, away from the din of alarms, phones, call bells and anxious families.

I entered the world of healthcare 30 years ago by answering an ad in the paper for a Personal Care Attendant, or PCA. If you had asked anyone who knew me then, I would be on your Least-likely-to-become-a-nurse list or just least-likely-to-care. I had little patience for sissies with sniffles, and my sons will tell you I had Zero Tolerance for whining.

“Go to you room if you need to whine,” I would tell them, and they quickly learned that whining to yourself is absurd.

So I answered the ad. The wife of a 40-year-old quadriplegic needed help. Jimmy had broken his neck drunk on a motorcycle and now depended on someone else to feed, wash, dress and move him. It was the first time I had to push past the awkwardness of a helpless human body, so vulnerable and frail, and learn to care for the soul within it as well. This was a huge learning curve and there were days where Jimmy and I both wanted to quit.

It was no coincidence that Jimmy’s wife, and reluctantly Jimmy, were born again Christians and I was not. This man, with just enough strength to push out the air to argue, caught me in the middle of his beef with a God that would lay him up in bed for the next 20 years, at the mercy of clueless people like me. Oddly, it positioned me in a place of wanting to know a few things too, and before I left Jimmy’s for nursing school, I too had surrendered to this beautiful and terrifying Father who could woo us with cords of boundless love and mercy yet love us enough to let us go, even if it meant crashing into a telephone pole drunk.

As I walk down the deserted hallway from the break room, the rooms behind the closed doors come alive in my memory. I first worked on this floor as a “student nurse” in the late 80’s, then hired as an RN when I graduated. I remember caring for a 90-year-old woman here, my young face startled by her pale gossamer skin and network of tiny blue veins threading up her arms. She was amused by my innocence.

Then in this room, my first young guy, a diabetic, handsome and flirtatious, and how I flushed when I had to give him an IM injection in his left buttock. And room 27, where I saw my first dead man, sitting up in bed like he was watching TV, but he was gone, just a body that I would help wrap and pull the zipper over his face. I have never grown used to that. And I remember an older nurse, like me now, telling me “No matter what, take a break. Get off the floor!” And I’ve held to that advice, 26 years later.

But I’ve always loved nursing, to be face to face with sickness, and the despair and fear it can bring. To be there, to join in, has been as natural for me as breathing and I recognize it as a particular gift from God, made more perfect after I lost my son 14 years ago. “Deep calls to deep,” the Bible says. When you have gone through some things, others will trust you with their pain.

I have an old nurses body now; the shoulder has been injected, the hip scoped, the back MRI’d and I think the knees are next on the chopping block. So I’ve taken a step back from the bedside into the IV team when I return from surgery. I will still see many patients, but I will not be washing them, hauling them out of bed or  whispering in their ear when they are trying to die. But I know my God, and I know He never takes back His gifts, He just changes the scenery from time to time.

I’m glad nursing has never defined me, and I always feel a little sorry for nurses who do try to get their sense of purpose from a career that doesn’t often give back in the ways we want – few kudos from the upper echelon, often yelled at by a patient long before you get a thanks (You want me to get up?!?!) and spending a lot of time in places with “output” that I won’t describe here, although if you see a group of nurses together laughing until they cry, it’s likely over the things we can’t tell anyone. “Fine,” is what I tell my husband at dinner when he asks how my day went. As all the faces and images flash before me, I know Fine is safe and enough.

Neither do I define myself by being a wife, mom and a grandma, roles I cherish way beyond nursing. I would drive them all crazy if I did. As it is, I have a husband who still adores me, two beautiful daughter-in-laws who apparently love me, but more importantly love Jesus, my sons and grandchildren. I simply can’t ask for more.

Delight your self in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 ESV

Many of us just use Jesus as an add-on, like a rabbit’s foot charm.

If I do this, then I get that.

It’s in our Promise Book, conveniently alphabetized for a quick look; Children, Health, Wealth with a coordinating scripture we can chant over our own selfish wants. But delighting ourselves in Him means our lives are hid in Christ and He in us. It is a posture of submission that grants abiding and oneness, so that our desires will always align with His will. Obedience becomes a joy, not a hard task. And what I think I really need may be the precise thing He will remove or never give. Can we trust this Jesus, this God-man who says we must hand over all, including our plans and our identity?

Corrie Ten Boom said “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” This was a truth I discovered after Spence died, and that pit seemed bottomless. As a nurse, I have had to stake my career on it; that in the despondent alcoholic, the cancer ridden mother and the cries of a parent who lost a child, whether that child is 6 or 60, I can share that place of overwhelming darkness because Jesus has gone before us.

My nursing career is not done yet, just transitioning once again. And my hope and prayer is this:

God, use whatever I have in every new place, in each new day. Give me manna for today that I may share it, giving glory back to you. Your crazy daughter — Robin

Filed Under: Faith, Hope, Loss Tagged: nurse, surgery
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