When you interview for a nursing position, one of the questions you are guaranteed to be asked is, “Why did you choose nursing?” The standard answer is, “I want to help people.”
Of course, you have the few odd ones who become nurses for other reasons: maybe they have a fetish for people in hospital beds (sadly, I met at least one of those in my years working at Tampa General), or maybe they just watched a lot of “ER” growing up and went into the field expecting all the doctors they would work with to look like Noah Wyle or George Clooney (even more sadly, this couldn’t be further from the truth). But most of those fresh-faced, young nurses just want to help people.
I’m sure I gave the same answer in my first interview, and it was as true then as it is now. I’ve always been one of those maternal sorts, destined to be a caretaker. I did choose nursing because I wanted to help people, because I wanted to make a difference in the world. Maybe that’s why God chose me. To help those who are left. To make a difference. To save the world.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
9 days before Infernal Friday
Josefina Lopez was known simply as “Jo” to all her colleagues, for any name more than three syllables long was too much of a mouthful to be shouting down the crowded halls of the Emergency Room, and too complicated for patients who were seriously ill or injured to remember.
Most of the latter didn’t call her by name anyway; she was only someone there to serve them, to be a liaison between them and their doctors, until they were either released or admitted to another floor. But she liked when they did use her first name; it made her feel as if she’d made a connection with them in the short time they would be in her ER, and that was important to her. She was sure it made it less scary, less stressful, for the patients and their families, to have a nurse they could trust, and she strived to be that nurse to every patient who fell under her care.
Of course, some were easier than others, and tonight, it was down to the difficult ones. It was going on midnight, barely halfway through her twelve-hour night shift, and things were slowing down in the ER at Tampa General Hospital. Most of the night’s accident victims and heart attack patients had been treated and shipped upstairs; they were just waiting on X-rays and lab results for a man who’d fallen asleep at the wheel and driven his car into a ditch. Other than him, it was mostly the drunks. Not the same crowd of intoxicated college students and twenty-somethings who were brought in on Fridays and Saturdays, thankfully, but these were the serious alcoholics, the ones who got wasted enough on a Wednesday night to warrant a trip to the ER for a banana bag. Needless to say, most of them were less than pleasant to deal with. When they called her by name, it was usually part of a slurred rant because they wanted to bust out and drink some more, and things around the hospital weren’t happening fast enough to satisfy their addiction.
She could hear one of them shouting down the hall now, as she made her way to the nurses station to use the phone. She had told Gabby she’d be calling around midnight to check in.
Normally when she was scheduled for a night shift, her daughter Gabrielle spent the night with her grandparents, but tonight, Gabby had begged to sleep over at her best friend’s house. Although it was a Wednesday, the girls were out of school for the week for spring break, so Jo hadn’t had a problem with her staying up late. It wasn’t that she worried about.
At almost thirteen years old, Gabby was trustworthy enough, as much as any girl that age could be. In the past year, she’d even started babysitting for some of the younger kids in the neighborhood where they lived. Jo only allowed her to sit when she was at home, close enough to run to Gabby’s aid in a few minutes, should she have trouble, and only for a few hours at a time. Still, it was enough to make Gabby feel grown-up and important, and she got some extra spending money out of it, more than the meager allowance Jo could afford to give her for her chores at home.
No, it wasn’t Gabby she didn’t trust; it was everyone else. She didn’t see how she’d ever feel comfortable leaving her daughter home alone at night, not after what had happened last June. The memory, never far from her thoughts, crept in, raising goosebumps on her skin.
That night had been an unusually cool one, for a Florida summer, and Jo and her husband Luis had been all too eager to turn off their air conditioning, open up the house, and save some money on their electric bill. Ever since the war, energy prices had been even more outrageous than when Bush was in office, and it was getting ridiculously expensive to keep their Florida home cool.
They had gone to bed that night with the windows open and slept deeply under the cool breeze that blew through the window screens. It had been Gabby, normally a deep sleeper herself, who must have heard the noise in the kitchen first, though she said later she didn’t remember what woke her up. In any case, Jo and Luis were awoken a minute later by her scream.
The scene that had awaited Jo when she ran into the kitchen was like one from a horror movie, and it replayed in her mind as such. She had found her daughter held tight by a man dressed in dark clothing, his thick arm around her skinny frame, the glinting blade of a knife pressed to her throat.
“Nobody move,” he warned them in an abrupt voice when he saw the adult man and woman advancing on him. Jo could hear the quaver in his voice and knew he was nervous. At the time, it made her think he could be reasoned with. Looking back, it should have scared her more. People who are acting out of panic, out of fear, are unpredictable.
When Luis went for him, the man cut Gabby, then sank the knife into his front. Jo, acting on the rush of adrenaline that was coursing through her own body, ran toward him blindly, thinking of nothing but getting him away from her family. She remembered the flash of metal as the desperate intruder jabbed the knife into her belly, and she remembered her astonishment that there was no pain, not while her racing mind was preoccupied with saving her husband and child.
The would-be robber had fled in fear without stealing a thing, leaving Jo slumped in the puddle of blood that was rapidly expanding beneath her family.
Luis was already taking his last breaths when she got to him; the knife had entered his chest and punctured his lung, and he stopped breathing before he bled to death. He was dead by the time she finished calling 911; not even her skills as a trauma nurse had been enough to resuscitate him. When the ambulance arrived, the EMTs found her propped against the kitchen cupboard, her dead husband lying at her feet, her daughter cradled in her arms. Her hands pressed a blood-soaked towel not to the stab wound in her own belly, but to her little girl’s neck, trying desperately to save her from bleeding out through her jugular.
Ten months later, Gabby was coping as well as could be expected. She wore a choker necklace to hide the scar on her neck and went fishing with her best friend Makayla’s father instead of her own and tried to act as though everything were okay. But on the nights she was home, Jo sometimes still heard the muffled sound of her crying through the walls as she tried, and failed, to fall asleep.
She wished Gabby would come to her, so that they could put their arms around each other and cry together, but Gabby never did. She had the fiercely independent streak of her father, and so Jo was left to cry alone, in a bed that was too large without Luis’s warm body nestled next to her. Working the third shift gave her a reprieve from the nightly struggle to fall asleep when it was dark and she was lonely.
Under the bright, fluorescent lights of the ER, Jo sighed, feeling suddenly drained, and picked up the phone at the desk to call her daughter.
