It's been raining all morning, pissing down raining.  We need the rain and the plants are happy but it's also gray and cool outside.  I don't feel like being outside in weather like that.  

I'm back on the floor and dealing with my patients again.  A woman yesterday, seventy-two, who had her central line removed six weeks after having it put in.  She said the chemo was too awful and she didn't want to feel like that in the short time she had left.  I told her, I think I would feel the same way.

Another woman, terrified of having a central line put in.  When it was done, she was shocked at how well it went.  She felt a bit of pain with the freezing needles but otherwise it was fine.  She left happy and pleasantly surprised.  I imagine she slept well last night.

Many new patients and some old patients.  A patient in yesterday for a lung biopsy, both he and his brother have bowel cancer and I remember when he first started treatment.  His cancer has spread to his lungs.

So many patients that I used to see when I first started in cancer care eleven years ago, no longer come for scans.  A part of me likes to think they are okay, at home, enjoying life but another part of me knows the truth, they are dead.

There is a lot of grief in our building, in the world really.  The grief of one person is just a microcosm of the world's grief.  There is so much suffering in the world, it feels almost suffocating at times and yet we endure.  Humans are amazing really, when you think about it.  We keep going, even in the face of death.  

I'm actually not sad today, despite this post.  I took a course at work not that long about grief and trauma.  It was quite interesting and made me think about grief in a whole new light.  We grieve so many things over our lifetimes; the loss of a city, the loss of friends, the loss of our youth, the loss of what we thought we had, the loss of health, the loss of loved ones, the loss of our dream child and our dream parents.  Acceptance is hard and requires a lifetime I realize now.   

I want to study grief I think, when I retire.  I think, I believe that we need to address grief and loss in our health care system, especially among health care professionals.  These past two and a half years of the pandemic have only shone a light on what health care professionals have always dealt with, death and loss in so many forms.  I have lost so many patients over the years, which makes me sound like an awful nurse I know, but I still carry so many of them with me, memories of them.  It's how we live on in part but it's also hard to carry at times, for those who do the remembering.

Nurses need to be able to share their grief with other nurses and even with families.  We need to find a better way of dealing with grief in health care and I would like to be a part of that.  

I guess time will tell.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.