Tresspass in Temptation and Suffer in Sacrifice

 It’s been years! It’s been lifetimes. As I’ve grown in age I’ve learned that my world view has become sort of a kaleidoscope. Gradually, slowly changing shape yet suddenly entirely new. Yet it’s all still the same colors shifting and rearranging offering new light, new interest, renewed regard for what’s always been in front of me. A gradual rearrangement yielding new impression. A different vantage point offering new perspective and each vantage point adding to the overall landscape. Evoking a sense of understanding and knowing if only for the fact that I can appraise the entirety of it all to a degree I hasn’t been aware of before. 

I started my nursing career at the beginning of a global pandemic. I graduated December 2019, became board certified January 2020, started working in a hospital February 2020 and March 2020 all hell broke loose. I feel I’ve grown light years since becoming a nurse, experiencing others trauma, others loss and truly TRUELY understanding the fragility of life. In my short career as an RN I’ve lived and worked in a country where 1.02 Millon Americans have died. I’ve walked into countless COVID rooms, draped in PPE, recycled and reused- when everything was so unknown. We’re set to have another wave. All the nurses know it. The Spanish flu had three big waves and Delta was the worst in the hospital because the symptoms were severe. The first wave was scary because we didn’t know what we were up against. The majority that came in had mild symptoms but the ones that got it bad got it BAD. All of us at the nurses station would scratch our heads wondering why one in one room had no symptoms when next door one was frantically trying to keep a sense of air reaching their lungs, mechanical BIPAPS forcibly pushing air into them to keep them oxygenated. Some complaining the air from the BIPAP felt as though it was smothering them with the pressure it exerted into their airways not knowing if they removed it they would certainly die. 

Life is like that. There is this ever unknowing that we adapt to which we learn to be at terms with. No matter how uncomfortable it may be we know that sometimes we just don’t know, we just won’t know, we just can’t know. It’s as certain as we know that our life here isn’t forever. If we’re smart we recognize our blessings we hold on to them cherish them and remain thankful for them because we know those  blessings very well could have possibly never been ours to begin with. 

My father passed away last year in January. Not from COVID a more gradual, innocuous kind of way. The kind of way that happens slowly over years with poor diet. I never experienced loss. Since my parents immigrated from Malta and Mexico my grandparents remained in their relative countries. So I didn’t have an elderly person I watched grow old. My first loss was my dad. I don’t even know how to explain it other than a crashing wave that never ends. No not the wave you in the wave. It’s a loss of all sense of direction in the world. Not knowing up from down, everything kind of coming at you from all directions and so quickly you can barely process it all. It’s this rolling, crashing into a buoyant swell of emotions.