- © 2005 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
Everything seemed backward to me when I started working night shifts: it was dark, and I was awake. I looked upon it as if I were the captain of a ship, ferrying patients from night to light, keeping them safe from the storms of pain and anguish. I trawled up and down the halls while bells rang from the beds of the dying. The keys were heavy in my hands; they pulled the pocket of my uniform down; back and forth I went, dispensing mercy in every conceivable form — syringe or solution, tablet or pill, capsule or gellule or infusion or driver. Oh, I would make it all go away. As I walked the halls it was the wail of a concertina I heard each night. Delirium rose with the darkness. Overbed tables were upturned, patients wandered naked in the hallway, incontinent, crying, dying. The fear was palpable, and I had to make it all better, make it go away, soothe it. Me? A regular person — nothing special except that I was there when they took their last breath. I would love them and bag them and tag them and ship them down to the morgue on a gurney and think of their souls. And it still stays with me: I remember the names. Sometimes I get a letter from the family. “Thank you,” they say. “Thank you for helping us.” But I didn't, really; I just did what called me.
So I did this night shift thing for a year, until my brain was fried from lack of sleep. I had to medicate myself to sleep during the day, and it never worked. Invariably the others would find me on a Friday morning in tears, sometimes with the shreds of a dead one on my uniform. Oh yeah, sure, it's just a shell we're in, you say, sure … but who cleans it up when it springs a leak? I did. And with a smile. And gently, ever so gently. You wouldn't get a rough touch out of me. Even when they were dead, I put music on for their soul to go to heaven, so they could filter up easily to the sky. I wouldn't want them to have a rough ride of it all, even though they had called me 31 times in one night and I had walked myself back and forth and given them oceans of narcotics. Be gentle, be kind. And really, we all ought to be doing this for the living, though we forget on a daily basis. So I have this question. Who is going to be my gentle angel? Who is going to hold me? Who is my soft spot? Whose wings will I fall under?