Take Care

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On the Vocation of Nursing

Jared and I spent one long week in the hospital back in February, watching his grandpa struggle to live. We stood at his bed rails all hours of the day, watching the nurses come, check, chart, rearrange IVs, then pass the clipboard of notes to the next nurse, then the next. In his last few hours, there were nurses who stayed past their shift just to give instructions and keep him stable. By the end of the day, their faces were red, and, I imagine, their feet were too. Jared and I both wish we could find every one of them, take their hand, and thank them.

I often take for granted the fact that my grandma Karen worked in nursing for 50 years, until she was nearly 70. She started at Bothwell Memorial Hospital in Sedalia, Missouri when my dad was just in elementary school, playing ball on the street corner and skating at Liberty Park in winter, and she continued in the field until Dad and Mom had given her all six of us grandkids. 

I remember the day Nanny retired. We went with her to the hospital (Mercy Hospital by then), and she let me swipe her badge to clock out for the last time. The other doctors and nurses honored her with a scrapbook, congratulating and praising her with handwritten notes. I’d sit on her couch and read it, proud of their glowing words of my tenderhearted grandma. They knew her as a co-worker, but I knew her as Nanny.

Papa will laugh at how Nanny shuddered her way through nursing school, the awful test taker that she was. She was not the academic type; she’d rather go shopping with friends or host cookie bakes in her little Cape-Cod-esque kitchen. She loved people, and in Papa’s eyes, this far superseded any prerequisites nursing school might demand. Anyone can pass a test, but not just anyone can talk a patient into surgery as if it’s going to be a picnic on a sunny day at Nantucket Sound.

If snow was predicted, Nanny would get up at 4am and drive to the hospital so she could start her shift before the front moved in. She worked in outpatient surgery. She was not on a night shift. That kind of motivation – the urge to pull off the covers and leave a warm house in the dark – must be fed by twin rivers of purpose and love. It’s the self-discipline Paul wrote of, that outworks even the early-rising, gym-going athlete. 

“They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable” (1 Cor. 9:25). 

For a nurse, it’s a kind of discipline that often goes unseen. Sure, it had its Hollywood moments. Nanny’s first position was as a private nurse for the Grand Dame of Sedalia, Miss Virginia Flowers. She cared for Bess Truman, wife of Harry S. Truman (it’s true!). But in between those stars were thousands of patients we’ll never know—everyday lineman, farmers, grandmas, and even her own aging parents and grandparents, whom she cared for until they passed away.

In a bee colony, nurse bees are the mothers of the hive, dedicated to feeding the larvae and caring for the queen as she lays eggs. They spend their first two weeks on the planet pouring themselves into the life of the hive, just as a nursing mama pours herself into the belly of her growing baby. My grandma Karen poured 50 years of her life into the bodies and hearts of sick and fearful people. Hers may have been one of the last faces they saw before surgery, and like a baby looking up at the mother feeding it, I cannot imagine a more comforting sight.

Even into her 70s, she maintained a joy that attracted people to her as if she was the most popular girl at school. Folks came up to us at her funeral and said, “Karen was my best friend,” but we soon realized everyone thought the same thing. It wasn’t the makeup and blonde hair (she’d grayed prematurely and quickly corrected it) that won her so many friends. It was the heart of a nurse—a lifegiver—who reached out with both soft arms and said, “Here, let me take care of you.” Maybe that’s why she ended her phone calls with “Take care.” It was in her blood to care, deeply and gently, not just for her family, but for every grizzled man and trembling girl who came through the hallways of the ambulatory surgery center. 

In older centuries, a nurse was a female servant who had the care of children—otherwise called a nanny. How fitting. How like Christ, who “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant… he humbled himself” (Phil. 2:7-8).

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[i] Nurse – Etymology, Origin & Meaning from https://www.etymonline.com/word/nurse