If Only

Two words I wear proudly on a button attached to my nursing scrubs: Cancer Sucks. That says it all, of course, I would like to insert an explitive or two in between cancer and sucks. As the days pass here on the oncology unit I learn more and more that life is precious, life is beautiful, life is a blessing, life is worth fighting for, life is not fair.


Instead of a young woman with breast cancer dying, who has an eleven year old son and loving husband, why not the man who chooses to murder and rape and create pain for others? Why can't all the bad people be punished, and all the good people avoid such horrible diseases as is cancer? Why is my patient down the hall upset that her grape juice is watered down and she will go home soon, while the man two doors down is dying of a large tumor, the same disease that killed his son ten years ago? I'm feeling restless and angry tonight at work, this feeling I'm sure will pass with time, or maybe not, but it will never be fair.



I have been taking care of a man with a large facial melanoma (when I say large, I mean it looks like a large grapefruit coming out of his cheekbone) for the past two nights, but when I came into work tonight, the assignment had changed. I saw his wife in the hall at the beginning of the shift, and she collapsed into my arms. I stood with her, cried with her, in the hall as she told me how they have been married 41 years, been through so much, he worked so hard his whole life, and for this? She told me they did an abdominal CT today because they're suspecting his cancer has spread to his abdomen. She then told me that their only son died ten years of the same type of cancer. Life is not fair, but it is precious.

The irony of all this is while I was typing the first paragraph, one of our patients died. He was in his late fifties/sixties and started having heart attacks after a long battle with cancer. He decided yesterday evening that he wanted to be DNR. As I sat typing, the charge nurse came and told me that I needed to ask the secretary to call the chaplain, because he had just died. It was sudden, and his wife was at his bedside holding his hand. I walked into the room to make sure she wasn't alone, and she wasn't. The charge nurse was with her as she lay over her husband's body crying and talking to him. I had to leave the room to sob in the bathroom.

Life is not fair, but it is precious.