Nurses know something deeper about our bodies than we do. They know something different about healing, about the practice of healing, about the patience and perseverance in healing. What nurses know about care giving is different than what doctors and families do. This one from Kerala, a nun in her previous avataar, had nursed me back to health in childhood when I fell terribly ill for the first and only time. I wouldn’t allow any doctor near me in her absence; I needed to see her face, hold her hand, the hand that secretly offered candy. She was unsentimentally affectionate, something about her grace made me feel brave. Nurses are the people I remember from my visits to hospitals since. I admire the ones who are dispassionately efficient, but those who have unusual access to the depths and shallows of the human condition in sickness are the ones I never forget.
I recently discovered that nurses have been poets too. In ‘The Poetry of Nursing’ (edited by Judy Schaefer), nurse-poets write poems and commentaries on life and death. Here is one who writes about touching, the only sense that is forbidden in the times of the pandemic today - ‘I took a long look at my willingness to touch and be touched. I understand the professional prohibitions. Yet, this moment of touching and being touched was a healing one’ - Lianne Elizabeth Mercer. Nilima Sheikh refers to her words as part of a tribute to nurses in her recent showing ‘Salam Chechi’ at Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018, painting below)
It is heartbreaking to see that health care workers are living in the face of fear today. They should not have to beg for personal protection equipment, they should not have to put out appeals on social media, they should not have to work knowing that being infected is inevitable, knowing as we all do that it is preventable. On the frontline are nurses today performing extreme shifts in isolation wards (no meals or bathroom breaks allowed). In China, the epicenter of the outbreak, more than 3,300 nurses and health care workers have contracted the virus. The number in India is rising now. Governments are scuttling between vendors for PPE supplies, trying to outbid each other, and I desperately hope that all this is not a tragedy unfolding. Every single nurse out there, every single health care professional deserves to be protected, and it is our ethical duty to demand that this happens.
