Nurses are the angels in disguise amid pandemic

We all appreciate when people do their work well. We admire their craft, their resilience and their hard work. Yet, there are so many ‘Good Samaritans’ out there who work silently behind the scenes without flaunting their talent and sense of compassion. They give their all in their perhaps extreme shift timings even if they get no thanks in return. I am referring to nurses.

From November 2020 onwards, I have been in and out of hospitals after losing vision in my right eye and being diagnosed with acute TB. Needless to say, the nurses became my best friends. The nurses would come around regular intervals to check my temperature, blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels on a pulse oximeter. They always gave me the correct medicines in time there being no complaints against them. Indeed nurses get peed on, spat on, bled on, puked on, and yet take it in their stride as part of their job responsibilities. When a patient dies, they are too busy consoling the relatives that they have no time to even call their own parents to say ‘I love you’.

When I was admitted to the hospital, I was going through a phase where at one point every morning I used to vomit out my breakfast. The nurse would rush with a vomiting bowl, clean the vomit and promptly give me ORS salts for loss of electrolytes in my body. How many of us will even clean a family member in that position. I remember once I had to go from the hospital to a diagnostic centre to get a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan done and was amazed to see a few nurses awake and active at 4:30 am moving silently among the sleeping patients to wake me up and help me get ready in time for the scan. Even though they had not had their breakfast and had missed so many hours of sleep, they worked hard.

Did they crib and whine? No, not at all. To me, this was not just a professional doing her job but I felt that in her smart white, she was an angel in disguise. On your next hospital visit, learn and appreciate nurses who sign in as nurses but who are indeed beautiful souls sent by God.