Every once in a while, I remember and miss it.

I was a nurse, that is, before the accident. I worked Labor and Delivery and in my life time have seen more babies born than I can remember, and, in fact, I have delivered more babies than I can remember. I miss nursing; it was a place where I fit. You know, I was able to go to work and make women and their families feel at ease. For whatever reason, from the time I was first out of nursing school, I had confidence and my patients trusted me. Lately, I have been dreaming about being a nurse and forgetting important things like forgetting to give my patients their medications, or check their IVs or be there when their babies came out. It’s too weird. Maybe it’s this move forward, the getting my Masters or the idea that I am feeling less confident because I am not teaching, yet. Last night I dreamed that I had a patient who was paralyzed and he slept all night and I had to go in and wake him up and tell him he was never going to walk again, but I didn’t want to do this terrible thing. I kept remembering my legs and how I felt when they told me how I was never going to walk again, and how little by little, over an eight year time period, I began to heal. I didn’t want to tell him. When I woke up, I was sad, not that I hadn’t told him or that he was paralyzed, but that I was no longer a nurse.