cameron carlock's Profile

I had been his nurse off and on since his initial diagnosis the previous spring, and had cared for him more recently after an autologous stem cell transplant.

I had been his nurse off and on since his initial diagnosis the previous spring, and had cared for him more recently after an autologous stem cell transplant.

This is what it means to be a nurse in oncology, a no-win situation where compassion routinely gets hijacked by grief. On TV or in the movies, dying patients are usually tended to by physicians. But if you die in a hospital, the person caring for you in your last days, hours, and minutes will be a nurse. The doctors care, too, of course, and check in and write orders, but we’re the ones who are always there. We watch over the patients as they struggle against their disease, and we’re there, too, if they decline, beginning their slow embrace with death.

This is what it means to be a nurse in oncology, a no-win situation where compassion routinely gets hijacked by grief. On TV or in the movies, dying patients are usually tended to by physicians. But if you die in a hospital, the person caring for you in your last days, hours, and minutes will be a nurse. The doctors care, too, of course, and check in and write orders, but we’re the ones who are always there. We watch over the patients as they struggle against their disease, and we’re there, too, if they decline, beginning their slow embrace with death.

She had remained calm and kind throughout his many hospitalizations, but I could hear the worry in her voice.

Why did this patient matter so much to me? This was the patient who thought I looked like a “Phyllis” more than a Theresa, so “Phyllis” became a joke between him, his wife, and me. One of the first days he was in my care, when he still looked healthy and felt pretty robust, he told me a hilarious story, supposedly true, but unprintable in a family newspaper, about infidelity, obesity, and why it’s good to have a cellphone handy if you’re trysting in the backseat of a car. The first time he spiked a temperature I called the intern in a panic. “He’s got a fever!” I said, as if it was the first fever in the history of the world. Later I apologized to her, but she understood.

The lounge to the N.I.C.U. was filled with his family members, all sad, some crying. I saw his wife, who hugged me. She asked me if I wanted to see him, but I said no, since he wouldn’t have known me. Instead, we talked about the two of them, about trying to pick up her life, about making sure that he wasn’t suffering. When I left she said the same thing she had said to me the last night her husband was my patient: “I love you.” He died later that day.