vocational pooh...arms of comfort

i work at a hospital. i have a professional job title but the reality of what i do is two part: pooh crew and while i am not saving lives i invest in the quality of the patient’s day and the healing process.

pooh is the force with which i have met much vocational resistance...metaphorically speaking.

close friends know the tensions and questions of purpose i have experienced in relation to my pursuit of asspiring to become a nurse. the academic tension-jumping through the hoops of prerequisites, short admissions openings and long waiting lists. the bread and butter tension- midnight shift, day shift...craziness and boringness of going to work. spiritual tension- things with great worth met the most resistence. i am still on track to get into a nursing school.

why nursing? an unheard of question not long ago. i witnessed the power of nursing in africa. i was a photographer watching and documenting. i came back wanting to be more than a watcher. i wanted to be part of the healing process.

stateside i have often forgotten that desire to be part of the healing, while crawling through the mess of body fluids, painful anxiety and sleepless confusion of night shift both mine and the patients not to mention sleepy eyed doctors. MANY TIMES i have pressed the "code button" of nursing. dramatically and urgently attempting to amputate it from my system. but i cannot shake it. nursing is what i am supposed to do. not stateside no, but somewhere in africa. someday. someday soon.

stateside pooh crew is practice, i get an unlimited amount of personal protective latex gloves and i have working plumbing that takes the pooh far far away (there are nights when i leave the hospital and I could swear the huron river level has risen without rain but from the stank of my shift). in africa who knows if i will start with enough gloves and plumbing that works let alone plumbing that takes the mess away.

it is my shame that i have wandered and lost focus so many times. lost sight because of selfishness. an image in this weeks TIME brought it all back into focus.

The article is called The Deadliest War and the caption for the image: Arms of Comfort- At a hospital in Bunia, Congo, a mother tries to soothe her two young children suffering from malaria and dysentery.