The Beautiful Hospice Nurse: She Rises
Does anybody really know her? Do they know her heart? Sometimes she tries to tell you, how she feels inside. She has never found the right words to describe her illness, how it feels in her mind. The pain that she would never wish on anyone. She has Type II Bipolar Disorder. Her highs aren’t so extreme as Type I but her lows, her depression is fierce.
Oh, she loves to write when she feels good. She welcomes the mania because she can create. She calls it “Manic Expression.” What separates her mania from Type I is that she doesn’t believe she is the world’s greatest author, although she likes what she writes and likes to share it. She knows during those slight highs that there will be some type of crash mentally and emotionally.
The Beautiful Hospice Nurse has been hospitalized more times than she can count. Since her childhood, she has battled this illness. It is a miracle that she has survived for so long. At one point in her life after a serious suicide attempt she said to the doctor, “there has to be a purpose for all this.” Somehow, she finished her nursing education and became a Registered Nurse. She found that caring for others who suffer was her strength. That it kept her going, kept her alive.
Every couple or so years, the Beautiful Hospice Nurse would end up hospitalized for severe depression that cut so deep as if into her soul. After every hospitalization, she would have to begin anew. Usually whatever agency she worked for did not want her to return. If they did accept her back, there were always stern warnings about her performance and conduct whether she could do her job. The Beautiful Hospice Nurse had a perfect license with never a complaint about her. Whenever she felt herself declining she would get help. However, mental illness exacerbations could take quite a while to resolve. The employment and insurance culture usually did not allow for a full recovery. Her major difficulty in recovery was often the stigma about mental illness.
The Beautiful Hospice Nurse is getting older now. She doesn’t have the strength she used to have to rise back up after a bout of severe depression. Sometimes she thinks her illness is in some ways terminal. Sometimes she just wants to die it hurts so bad. She often thinks that suicide would be an answer. She has come very close to dying in the past. At one point, she was hospitalized for four months because they would not let her out. Every time she began to get stronger she would try to take her life. The beautiful Hospice Nurse did not consider suicide as an easy way out. She did not want anyone to be hurt by an act such as taking her own life. For her, the emotional and mental pain of her depression were so great at times. She just wanted that pain to go away. Several years ago she promised God and her children that she would never take her own life.
She always thinks about people she cared for. Somehow that helps her to recover. It scares her to think someday she won’t be able to care for others. Sometimes she thinks she will become a permanent resident of a mental hospital. So be it she says. If that is my fate, others have been there before. Why not me? But she is still afraid. Mental Illness is a very lonely illness. Others want to care but many times the illness won’t let them in. The pain from mental illness lingers and medication does not always relieve it.
The Beautiful Hospice Nurse does not really want anyone to feel sorry for her. She does appreciate a kind or encouraging word. Sympathy for her is not an answer.
At some point during a depressive episode she will find her strength. She will regain her purpose. She will rise again like the mythical phoenix rising from the fires of its own death to return again from the ashes of its past. It is reborn into a new life. The beautiful Hospice Nurse has been reborn many times in her life. She is determined to continue to rise.
Patsy, 2017
