on walking away

When I opened up the nursing schedule this morning to check staffing for the upcoming week, I glanced up at the top line. It’s the one where my schedule is posted, and I never really look at it because my schedule is the same every week. Monday through Friday, day shift. It’s simple.

Today, though, I looked at my own schedule and it hit me like a fist in the gut. Five shifts left. After four years down in the wards, I have five shifts left until I pack up and fly home for maternity leave. And when I get back, my badge is going to read Primary Caregiver, not Pediatric Nurse or Team Leader.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m more than excited about this new chapter in our lives, about the little one growing inside me, about finally getting to be a mama after dreaming of it since I was a teenager babysitting the neighbours. But this morning, looking around D Ward, the thought of leaving it all was a bitter pill to swallow. I’ll still be involved in little ways down in the hospital once we’re back on board with Poppy, but it’ll be nothing like it is now. I get to be there every day, now. I get to work with every patient that comes on board for maxillo-facial surgery. I get to hear every story.

Stories like Esther’s, who, at sixteen years old, came to us from Nigeria with tumors that Dr. Gary ranked in the top five that he’s ever seen. It wasn’t the size of them, although they were impressive by any standards, but the fact that they invaded almost her entire face. Usually we see this type of thing in either the lower or upper jaw, but not both. Esther’s disease had taken over both her jaws almost entirely, and in a marathon, nearly twelve-hour surgery last Thursday, Dr. Gary and two local surgeons took apart Esther’s face and put it back together with metal plates and screws and hundreds and hundreds of sutures.

Esther has been slowly recovering, first in the ICU and now back on the ward, and today I went to stand at the foot of her bed while her nurse changed her bandages and removed the drains from her incision lines. It was the first time I had seen her new face without the bulky layers of gauze and tape, and I couldn’t stop the tears that filled my eyes.

Oh, Esther, I told her, You are so beautiful.

Maybe I’m seeing her through the eyes of a nurse, looking ahead to the future, after the weeks it will take for all the swelling to go down, the months that still need to pass before the extra skin will retract back and tighten. But the little girl lying in that bed is beautiful nonetheless. She no longer needs the scarf that she wrapped herself in when she was admitted, the cloth she’s been using to cover her shame all these years.

Esther’s eyes widened and the hint of a smile crossed her lips as Alana (her nurse) brought her a mirror. She peered into it, just like she has every day since waking up free from her tumors, and dropped it to look back at me. What do you think? Alana asked her. Is it good?

Esther nodded once, that one tiny gesture speaking more than words ever could, and then settled back on her pillows, content to let us care for her.

This is what I’ll miss when I go. I’ve been a part of incredible things like this for so long that I have no idea how to be anything else. And for once, I have no answers for myself, no neat little platitude with which to sum up this entry. Just, I don’t know how I’m going to walk away from this next Thursday.