The Making of a Nurse (45 page)

I no longer differentiate between the person I am and the nurse I’ve become. Nursing is my profession and my way of life. It is a deep and abiding concern for the human condition. We are all nurses – or have the capacity to be – and we are all patients – or have the potential to be. I owe nursing a lot. It saved my life many times. Through the discipline of taking care of patients, I learned how to take care of myself. By finding compassion for my own suffering, I developed more compassion for others. Nursing showed me how to be joyful despite my own sadness. It has given me an awareness of the world’s suffering and the skills and knowledge to do something toward its alleviation. It has taught me how to love things I never thought I could love. Nursing is my way of celebrating life. I raised a glass of the sweet wine and offered a toast to my sisters:
“L’chaim –
to life!”

Thank you to everyone at McClelland & Stewart, especially Marilyn Biderman, Jenny Bradshaw, Elizabeth Kribs, and Krista Willis.

Thank you to my patients and their families for the privilege of being your nurse.

Thank you to the entire team of the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit, Toronto General Hospital. I am especially grateful to Stephanie Bedford and Edna Lee who made many improvements to this book. Thanks to Alexandra Radkewycz of the University Health Network for her assistance.

Thank you to my gang, who should know who they are, but here goes: Judith Allan-Kyrinis, Ann Flett, Chi Chi (Cecilia) Fulton, Lisa Huntington, Mary Malone-Ryan, and Linda McCaughey.

I am grateful to these mentors who helped make me a nurse and who continue to lead the way for so many: Virginia Bates, Sherrill Collings, Ingrid Daley, Mary Ferguson-Paré, Maude Foss, Doris Grinspun, Mary-Lou King, Marlene Medaglia, Denise Morris, and Kelly Sundarsingh. I would like to acknowledge Suzanne Gordon’s
insightful writing about nursing that has deepened and clarified my thinking on these matters.

Thank you to: Barbara Turner-Vesselago – I can’t imagine a better writing teacher; Catherine Gildiner, who told me what this book was about; Rabbi Arthur Bielfeld, who raised questions that I tried to answer in this book – and for much, much more. Thank you to friends who have nurtured me and thus, this book: Elise Dinstman; Tony, Daneen, Jonathan, Noel, and Luke Di Tosto; Joy and Bunny Friedman; Anna Gersman; Vanessa Herman-Landau; Rivi, Alan, Yonatan, Omri, and Yarden Horwitz; Avery Kalpin; Cathy, David, and Rachel Kreuter; Tessie Oredina; Bob, Norah, and Robyn Sheppard; Chick and Dick Weiner. Thank you to my wonderful Israeli
chevrai;
dear Leo Baeck friends, especially: Maggie Atkin, Eileen Goldberg, Lesley Kalpin, Marcie Kisliuk, Rhonda Schlanger, Ella Shapiro, Lori Sugar, Laurie Waldman, and Shirley Weiss-Greenspan; and treasured BJCC friends: Larissa Ber, Nadine Cowan, Pam Glass, Mara Koven, Annie Levitan, Andrea Pines, Rhea Wolfowich, and in memory, Malca Litovitz.

I thank my family: Harry, snake charmer and lover of all things reptilian, who I hope forgives me for not writing a book about someone famous (Nelson Mandela or Wayne Gretzky were who he had in mind); and Max, artist and athlete, who has taken great care not to body-check me too roughly into the boards so that I might live to write this book. Most of all, I thank Ivan Lewis for everything, but especially for showing me the way to – in the words of Gustave Flaubert – “be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.”