Hope: In Hopeless Healthcare
Sometimes I think counting the stars would be less futile than working in healthcare. Or maybe collecting the wind? Lately I feel locked in moral distress. It’s not just being a nurse in a pandemic, but some days being a nurse at all feels completely pointless. It doesn’t seem to matter what kind of excellent care I give in the hospital. If I give medications on time, work efficiently to make sure no one misses their tests, advocate for pain relief, document a thousand times over, assess, hustle and run, listen and empathize, work like a dog at the cost of my bladder and my lower legs.
In the end, I am still met with the harsh reality of what is really underneath the veneer of a wealthy society: homelessness, drug addiction, alcoholism, family discord, neglect, abuse, violence, cancer, and a whole slew of other horrors displayed on stretchers in our emergency wards. Like a squirt gun against a forest fire is little Shannon. I wade through the carnage of anxiety and mental illness, I patch up and release back to the big wide wild of the world and like a conveyer belt, the next batch runs through. I stand, paralyzed, at the torrential downpour of a wealthy nations’ vices and the wreckage they leave behind. With so much at our disposal, with a wealth of medications and diagnostics and expertise, there is no less need for help. We, the haves, are no further along than the have nots.
In a bizarre mirror-image sort of way, I have come from ‘over-there-Africa’, where an impoverished health system is no less morally distressing. Where fever and malnutrition, infection and malaria, dehydration and diarrhea are the ills. These of course, are fixable and solvable problems if only there were means. The ills of a society neglected and abandoned by the machine of progress. The divide ever grows as the western advancements march onwards, leaving those without the means to keep up, far behind. So the young die without basic, basic access to treatments, mothers die in childbirth, life ebbs away nonsensically because they do not possess that which we discard in the trash. Meaningless, it is all meaningless. In Malawi, I was equally hopeless to stop the rising flood of losses piled upon losses. Like a finger in a broken damn, it feels like when you are a nurse there.
Sickness and death- the great equalizer. It turns out, wealth has nothing on death.
Where does that leave me as a nurse? “Do it for the one, take care of that one starfish” so the saying goes. But what good is it to cover wounds and hold hands with the suffering? It never ends, you see. As soon as my grip is released from one dying hand, another is waiting to be held.
But, because without this interjection I would lose myself to hysteria and despair, there is no room for hopelessness here. [what?]
Without hope there would be no purpose in anything at all. Hope is the glue, it is the binding agent, it is the power to keep moving forward in the face of an incredible enemy called death. Hope, is the only thing that can motivate another IV, another day fighting for someone else’s ‘another day.’ Hope, is there, I just have to push back hopelessness to find it. It comes when I fix my gaze on the hero, the turning point that has already come, the if/then clause at the middle of human history: if God has conquered death, then what have we to fear? When our bodies betray us, when death comes for us, we do not need to imagine an absent God. He has come down to our despair already and met it with a cross. His death, for our life. This is not a pad answer. This is not a pithy solution. This is not a tylenol in the face of pancreatic cancer. This is the cure. Hope is not plastic, or pretend. Hope is the ultimate belief we have that there will be a reversal of all that has been lost.
Hope in the face of incredible loss is the weapon we all need even here, even now, and we already possess it, like a seed. When there is nothing left: faith, hope, and love; these three remain. Grow your hope. Nourish it.
Hope: the power to keep going. It is programmed into us, did you know that? It is what keeps us creating, and birthing, fighting for justice and making medications. Hope makes us renew the world a thousand times over despite the ever-present force of decay and death coming at us like a freight train. Hope is that deep knowledge that it’s not really hopeless in the end. Because if it really was, if it really was hopeless, we would all give up right now. Chaos would reign and none of us would carry on. But we do because deep down, our souls are programmed for a good storyline. Deep down, we need a hallmark Christmas movie because it’s a reflection of the real story. Deep down, we need the good guy to win and the bad guy to lose because that’s the true story. That story is the story of the gospel. What else can explain this seed of hope we all carry? Without it, no one would really be a nurse or a construction worker, or an artist, or a police officer or anything at all.
You have hope, it keeps you doing the things. Where does it come from?
It’s divine. It’s a gift.
Grow that hope, friends. Stake your hope seedling to the ground, in the true story. Keep raising the flag, fighting your fight, pursuing justice and mercy, healing wounds, making music and loving your neighbour. Keep doing the thing you were born to do to bring beauty to the world.