It’s not something I planned. But I realized as the family members of my residents appeared for their daily visits that I needed to tell them.

I’ve gratefully accepted a full-time position at work. (Can you hear the huge *but* coming?)… but it is the graveyard shift… but it is on another floor of the home. The short of which means that I will no longer be caring for the residents that I have been looking after for the past year.

I told the residents themselves of the change. Those that would remember, I told directly. Those that wouldn’t, I told with my hands. Change is difficult for all of them. Being cared for regularly by the same hands really does work miracles for those suffering from the many forms of dementia. They will be well looked after, I know, and get accustomed to new hands. It is just hard to let go. And there has been enough change on the floor of late already.  Activities of daily living irrevocably lost to inevitable progression of disease and several losses of faces that were familiar and beloved. Not a time I wanted to add more to their plate.

The families are a huge part of the home’s life. They were harder to tell. I didn’t want to disappoint or startle them either. And yet they were so amazing. The same lady who brought the staff two boxes of Ferrero Rocher last week – the dark chocolate versions were divine, fyi -  said something like,  “We understand. Change is good for all of us. Don’t forget us and come back to see us.”

I will most definitely be peeking in, but who’s caring for whom? /blush

I’ve passed two tests and gotten great marks. I’ve found my favorite weekly session to attend out of several possible time slots. As a class, we have loosened up and are having a grand time, laughing and making sign language bloopers while we study and practice together. I particularly enjoy improvisation to take the lesson that much farther. So far so good. All expected outcomes within normal parameters of a learning environment.

However there has been a quite unexpected outcome so surprising that I’d like to share it with you. Learning ASL has been quite a boost for my emotional health.

It had to have been one of our very first classes when the teacher corrected one of our mistakes and in the process taught us the sign for “wrong” or “incorrect.” Visit the ASL pro visual dictionary and search for wrong to get a sense of the sign.

Signing ASL with your hands but without corresponding facial expressions is incorrect. Imagine the difference in your voice as you tell someone about your day going just ok versus your day going absolutely swimmingly and everything happening just as you’d hoped and better. The inflection and volume of your voice on your words in those two different statements corresponds in ASL to the “volume” of your facial expressions.

Getting back to the example of the sign for “wrong,” you can imagine that it carries an unpleasant facial expression to go with the manual sign. I was the first to comment but we were all thinking it. I told the teacher in my best stuttering sign and alot of finger-spelling that it looks like you are being mean and/or are angry at us when you use that sign. No, no the teacher insisted. Wrong is just wrong, there is no anger or meanness.

Immediately I thought… isn’t that the most emotionally mature thing I’ve heard in a long while. It really is. No emotional wounds need cleansing out with peroxide or ignoring for the time being. It is what it is and you aren’t a bad person because you made a mistake. This is the way to do it right, there ya go, good for you.

That is just unspeakably clear-cut clarity. I LOVE it.

So the time for our second “test” came around and we learned that it would be a presentation that we stood up in front of the class to give rather than a pen and paper sort. And I have this terrible stage fright. I perform better at my job and most things when I’m on my own. The anxiety of living up to someone else’s expectations and worrying about their judgment of me causes me to question my every move and thereby stumble much more often. I was not excited about standing up in front of everyone.

But then I remembered this simple lesson. I am me and so is my signing. Without bragging, I am a good signer — probably due to having a deaf partner at work everyday and being forced – though happily – out of need and compassion to learn how to communicate.

I decided. I had to decide to simply be who I am. And I am not right and I am not wrong. I signed my way through with shaky knees but tried to leave all – my own and the ones i imagine from others – judgments alone. I did well. And I’ve remembered this lesson alot lately. Especially when someone thought they were funny and assigned me a PSW student to follow me around all day.

The real picture of what it is to be a nurse. Sweet, sweat, bodily fluids and more.

This story by Tilda Shalof expresses part of the same journey she describes in her book The Making of a Nurse. Only she wrote A Nurse’s Story first and I read it second. Still very highly recommended — for anyone with a stout heart that is.

It is perfectly titled. In each chapter she explores an area of nursing care:

• How the primary object nurses are known by is a bedpan and its infamous contents
• Giving compassionate care without judgment
• When is SO much care too much care
• Graduation with a degree is only the beginning of the journey to becoming a nurse
• Finding your niche within nursing
• The complex complimentary and contradictory relationship between doctors and nurses
• Keeping you as a person separate from you as a nurse: for sanity sake and the patient’s sake

I was constantly surprised at her bravery and thankful for her sharing.

how she doesn’t care  who laughs or snickers at her opinions and what she feels strongly about
how many decisions about end of life care are left in a nurse’s hands
how she able to label when she was defencive or angry and then use those situations to improve her care
how determined she is to advance the profession of nursing and chuck out the bedpan
how her natural inquisitiveness led to  nursing research
how she overcomes herself to become an awesome nurse

Once again she had me in tears on one page, my fingers wishing I could be part of a procedure on the next page. I’d read anything she wrote.

And I’m so immensely proud that she is out there speaking on our behalf with such optimism about our profession. I think that’s what I love best about Tilda. She knows all the pros and cons of nursing, but she doesn’t seem hardened by them. Her writing shows that she practices with immense hope and energy, all to the benefit of her work and patients. If only I could be one-quarter of the nurse she is one day.

If I live up to it, please put this quote from her book on my gravestone…

“She was a woman who conquered herself so that she could serve others.”

Can you see what he is signing?

Sitting in the break room, minding my own business, probably being a little snobby but Ender’s Game is just too good to bother with people I hardly know. When all of a sudden the nurses start talking about statistics. Correction, the nurses start whining about when they had to take statistics and my ears perked up.

I liked statistics when I took it. And I was thankful that it felt like a semi-easy math class compared to other maths I had taken and that it was an easy ok introduction for me back into university after a ten year hiatus.

So when the story they are regaling the breakroom with ends in “Yeah they had to lower the passing grade by ten points in order to get our class through the course.” Man, I really did a double take at who I was looking at.

Two nurses. I see them often. Young and new but still with *the* initials behind their name. My bosses for all intensive purposes when I happened to be assigned to their floor.

One talked of considering getting a tutor but had been prohibited due to the cost. Anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour! Right about now is when I start to wonder how very different the Canadian universites are from those in the States.

Because, man oh man, I did stinking awesome in Stat!!! I thought when I was done that I would consider taking more of that crap. Gosh, I don’t know if this sounds like bragging. It’s the furthest thing from where I am going. Do you guys know me, I wonder? Do you really know me? I am filled with self-doubt. It absolutely oozes out of my pores. I don’t know why really but I walk around with my head down most of the time, jumping like a scared ninny at anyone with the nerve to bark at me.

But after that eavesdropping, I felt like a helium balloon on cloud nine. Hell, all of a sudden I was in charge of cloud nine!

All I could think of was how come I don’t believe in myself?! These guys are sitting here with the same initials and degree that I want and the teachers had to bend the rules to get them there, bend rules that I would never need bent. All I could think of was — I can do it!

and i SO will.