The Last Person Who Will Love You

If I had been born just a few years earlier, I might have been one of the many nurses who ended up serving in the Vietnam War. When I graduated from nursing school, the war was finally over. Looking back I realize that I grew up with the Vietnam War overshadowing the bulk of my childhood and young adulthood, although it never really touched my life in any real way. My life as a nurse took an entirely different path, as I chose to work in Pediatric Intensive Care. I do not regret that choice, but, I often wonder if I could have handled the stress, trauma and exhaustion that come with being a combat nurse. I don't know how those brave young women handled the responsibilities that were thrust upon them. Many were novice nurses who had no idea what they were signing up for and I would have been right there with them. When you start off as a nurse, you really have no idea what being a nurse is all about. But, you learn fast and you do what needs to be done to survive each shift. The problem is that as you move from task to task, patient to patient, your mind focused on each precise detail that will save a life, there is no time to process the human suffering that is going on all around you. The emotions are often pushed aside, locked safely away so as not to disrupt the flow of the work that needs to be done. Until the day that all those buried feelings bubble to the surface wreaking havoc on your life and demanding that you do something with them. Many of the nurses who served in Vietnam returned home suffering from what we now know as PTSD. They fought for recognition of their contribution to the care of literally hundreds of thousands of wounded and dying soldiers. That recognition finally came in the form of the Vietnam Woman's Memorial pictured above (sculpted by Glenna Goodacre). Many women who served in Vietnam also contributed poetry to a book called, "Visions of War, Dreams of Peace" Writings of Women In The Vietnam War
(Edited by Lynda Van Devanter and Joan A. Furey.)

Here is some information from the "Vietnam Women's Memorial Foundation" website.

"An estimated 11,500 American women served in Vietnam, about 90 percent of them as medical personnel. They saw and touched the awful wounds suffered by 300,000 American boys, excluding those who were killed. Of the dead they saw, 29,000 were 17 or 18 years old.

The effect of so much exposure to so much pain was little understood for a long time. Like their male counterparts, these women returned in late 1960s and early 1970s to a sometimes hostile and, at best, uncaring reception.

They took years to realize that, like the men who fought, they could suffer post traumatic stress disorders and they too would have to come to grips with what they saw and felt.

"There is nothing more intimate than sharing some one's dying with them," a Vietnam-era nurse named Dusty wrote in a collection of poems, "Visions of War, Dreams of Peace."

"It is more intimate than sex, it is more intimate than childbirth, and once you do it, you can never be ordinary again." Here is one of Dusty's poems that struck a chord with me tonight.

Hello David

Hello, David-my name is Dusty.
I'm your night nurse.
I will stay with you.
I will check your vitals, every 15 minutes.
I will document your, inevitability.
I will hang more blood and give you something
for your pain.
I will stay with you and I will touch your face.

Yes, of course,
I will write your mother and tell her you were brave.
I will write your mother and tell her how much you loved her.
I will write your mother and tell her to give your bratty kid sister
a big kiss and a hug.
What I will not tell her is that you were wasted.

I will stay with you and I will hold your hand.
I will stay with you and watch your life
flow through my fingers
into my soul.
I will stay with you until you stay with me.

Goodbye David - my name is Dusty.
I am the last person you will see.
I am the last person you will touch.
I am the last person who will love you.

So long, David - my name is Dusty.
David - who will give me something for my pain?