he will see you

I love cataract patients. The ones we see on the wards are invariably the children, since adults undergo the procedure without general anesthesia. Kids, on the other hand, can't be trusted to stay still while a scary yovo doctor is fishing around in their eyeballs. (Go figure; there's something about logical thought that those little babies just don't get.) We're doing plenty of cataracts these days, so there are always a few little blind kids sticking close to their mamas' sides.

Today, things were busy. We've got patients from four different surgeons in A Ward, and patients are rotating from the operating rooms to the recovery room and back to the wards with dizzying regularity. A nurse is often just settling a patient after surgery when the operating room calls for another to be brought to the waiting area, so teamwork and flexibility have become the ongoing theme. As the charge nurse in A and B Wards on busy days like these, I tend to feel more like an air traffic controller than anything else.

Our pediatric nurse today, Becca, was at the centre of the whirlwind. The general rule of thumb is that surgeries are scheduled with the youngest patients first. (It turns out that, in yet another breakdown of logical thought, they don't do too well with being denied food, albeit for a good cause.) Three of her patients were first on the list in three different ORs, and they all seemed to go and come back within about five minutes of each other. At one point, she had just tucked in one patient and was waiting while another was wheeled back down the hall when the next OR called for yet another of her babies.

Becca's good, but she hasn't yet mastered the art of being in more than one place at a time, so I bundled the cloudy-eyed baby up in a fleecy blanket and walked with him and his mama down to the waiting area. I settled her onto the bench, her baby determinedly sucking both thumbs at the same time. As I stood there with the chart in my hand, the mama looked up at me with an expression of naked fear on her face.

I forget sometimes just how scary this must be. What kind of desperation does it take for a mama to walk up the gangway and willingly surrender her flesh and blood, to place her heart into the hands of strangers? My eyes clouded too, then, and I dropped to my knees to explain that she was doing the best thing for her boy. That bringing him to us while he's still small means he has the best chance of having optic nerves that actually work once his cataracts have been removed. That his young brain will be able to learn the sights of his world so much easier than if she had waited longer to gather her courage, like she so clearly wished she had.

The nurse from the operating room came out then. We checked him in and prayed together, and as she carried the blanket-wrapped bundle through the door, I waved. See you tomorrow, baby! The translator standing with us relayed my words, and the fear drained from his mama's face. Her smile broke wide and bright, and she threaded her hand into mine.

No, she told me. You will not see him. He will see you.