Excerpt from Nursing and Becoming:

Greetings from my spiritual journey, It’s been awhile. There are so many questions. Where to even begin? Where does one begin on a spiritual journey where there is ultimately no end?

What is the meaning of life? What makes a life worth living? What is human consciousness? Or, the worst question from a patient’s loved one: Are they still “in” there? These are questions of a spiritual nature that no doctor or specialist, or even the smartest ICU nurse (which I’m not) can answer. When all of a person’s brilliance, humanity, and contribution to society are reduced to bodily functions such as blood pressure, heart rate, respirations, urine output—what is left? After all, there are medications that can make blood pressure and heart rate higher or lower as needed, that can make a weak heart contract more forcefully; defibrillators that electrocute the heart into beating again; ECMO machines that pump and oxygenate blood when the heart and lungs will not; ventilators that force air into lungs which cannot inflate on their own, dialysis machines that filter toxins from blood when the kidneys have failed…a human being is not so special in terms of bodily processes. —So what is left?

Consciousness? Memories? Even these are ephemeral matters under philosophical debate. For memories are fallible, malleable, influenced by emotional state and point of view, and ultimately are not even “real.” For a memory is just a thought, which is just an electrical impulse of the neurons in your brain.

Perhaps the only thing left is love. That someone, somewhere, at some point, loved/loves this person, even if that person is a stranger—me. In the middle of the night I’m the one who watches their vitals, who bathes them, who turns them every few hours so they don’t get pressure injuries, who massages their sore muscles, who wipes drool off their chin, who suctions their secretions so they don’t drown in them, who tends to their wounds and changes their bandages. I am witness to every inch of their body.

And when my patient’s intracranial pressure increases to dangerous levels, or when their heart fails to pump, or when they stop breathing, or when their blood pressure shoots up or tanks, I am witness. I might brain code them four or five times in a single shift, so that one day, today, they are able to feed themselves and say their children’s names, even after someone lodged a bullet in their head. —True story.

Without ego I can say that I saved their brain from herniating out of the bottom of their skull. It was not necessarily because of any special skill or education, but simply because I was watching. For twelve hours, I watched. I didn’t go to lunch or take a break because I was watching. Because for those twelve hours, I loved them. This is my love letter.

When I was still a nursing student, I wrote that I thought being a nurse would make me a better Buddhist. Or that being a Buddhist would make me a better nurse. Turns out both are true. The Buddhist supreme virtue of loving kindness is what I strive for every shift. Loving kindness is what gives me an hour of patience—an hour that I don’t have—bending over to hold a urinal in place, giving a patient more time to urinate despite a history of an enlarged prostate and retention. Loving kindness is behind every cup of hospital coffee and crackers; when I beg the charge nurse for an exception to allow family to visit after hours; when I take my patient’s wife’s laundry home to wash for her because she won’t leave his bedside; when I listen to them tell me about their children and grandchildren; when I pull up a chair and sit by their bed to watch a television show of which I have no actual interest in; when I rub their shoulders and back to alleviate some of their misery; when I leave a bottle of lavender essential oils to help with nausea; and when I go buy Chinese pastries on my day off for my patient who doesn’t like hospital food. A thousand tiny gestures in the name of loving kindness.

One day, perhaps, some day I will become an arhat (“enlightened, awakened”), free from this endless cycle of desire/suffering.

But, until then, I suffer. And I love.

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