Journey Back to Baker Street

"In memory everything seems to happen to music."

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Glass Menagerie

It's amazing the power of a song to strip the years away in a single moment. A song from my childhood came on the radio this morning and the world folded in on itself and thirty years disappeared in a breath.

I was driving my daughter to school  and, just as I put my car into park at the elementary entrance, the song Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty came on the radio. I hugged my daughter goodbye and then sat in my car and let the waves of memory wash over me as I listened to the distinctive notes of the saxophone playing around me.

When I was little, maybe 6 or 7, I was given a tiny portable 45 record player. It was my treasured possession, even though the pink pleather box was cracked and weathered. It came with a single record, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head by BJ Thomas and I played that solitary song over and over and over again until my parents begged for relief. I tucked the record player back into the bottom of my closet and forgot about it for some months.

One day, some months later,  I was commissioned to help a friend of my mom's pack up her apartment to move. While there, I noticed her tossing some records into the trash. I asked if I could have them and she responded that many were scratched but I could have them if I wanted. I remember her shrugging and frowning as though perplexed at my elation over scratched 45s.  The only one of the handful of records that I recognized was Uptown Girl by Billy Joel as it was still being widely played on the radio. I grabbed all of them, recognizable or not, and finished the day of cleaning and packing with a spring in my step.

When I made it home, I pulled out my pink turntable, scooted up onto the bed that I shared with my sister and put record after record on. The woman who had gifted them to me had been right-- many were so scratched that they were unplayable. Two of them, the aforementioned Uptown Girl and Harvest Moon by Neil Young would play all of the way through. Most, however, ended up in my trash can.

I remember sitting there on that bed with my back up against the cold wall of the rickety trailer that we lived in in rural Iowa and placing the last record on the turntable. It too, was very scratched but I was persistently moving the needle around trying to find a spot that would still play. I'm not sure why I was so persistent with this final record, but I was. After a few minutes, I found the sweet spot and the sound of a saxophone solo burst into that tiny, dark bedroom. That sax solo was the only playable part of the record and, only a few seconds of it at that. But, there was something about the energy of those notes that stole my breath away.

I had always been an odd kid-- prone to crying jags, feeling the weight of the world perpetually on my shoulders, struggling with depression as early as kindergarten and with my nose perpetually in a book. It seemed that no one else on earth was like me. I felt lonely every, single day. However, those few notes that played out of my cheap, cracked pink pleather turntable were a revolation  for me. 

Those notes seemed to call out to me and tell me that I wasn't alone, that someone else out there felt the world as deeply as I did. I felt immediately less alone in the world. For the next weeks, until the record would become completely unusable, I would place the needle onto the record's single, sacred, unscratched section and cry with relief as the sounds of melancholy saxophone whispered into my lonely life and filled a hole that had never before been filled.

That broken record began a love affair with music that has since rivaled my voracious need for books. I had found the escapism and human connection of art. A tiny piece of my heart was healed that day and, if judging by my emotional reaction at hearing those same notes again today, the healing continues to this day. I am thankful for that single, broken record that was gifted to me at the time that I most needed it. I am grateful for the magic of music.

Life, Death & Compassion

They talk about nurses eating their young(older nurses giving new nurses a baptism by fire of sorts and making their early nursing careers hell) and I experienced a bit of that but much more so have experienced having nurses that want to teach me absolutely everything they know. 

In nursing school during my intensive care rotation I was assigned to what was then called the CT-SICU- the Cardiac Trauma Surgical Intensive Care Unit at a hospital in Des Moines, IA. It opened my eyes forever. As a rural Iowa girl, I had never seen a gunshot wound close-up and here I was caring for multiple victims. I felt like I was inside a television drama, it was so surreal. 

The nurses took me under their wing when they realized that I wanted to learn everything I could and I found myself called into rooms here and there to experience all kinds of amazing things like the bandage change with a wound nurse where I gently placed my hand inside a patient's back to change his dressings and could feel his lungs inflate against my hands. I was in awe of the human body and spirit at the same time that I was horrified by the terror that we humans cause other humans. 

The nurses on this unit were often jaded and weary and tired. They seemed oddly buoyed by my naïveté and would listen kindly as I asked fervent questions. 

I often would stay after the other students in my class had left. The other nurses wanted me to follow the wound care nurse and see a unique case...so many reasons that they wanted me to stay. My instructor didn't want me to stay after she left, but I just wanted to learn and I would stay and follow one particular nurse, with chronically smeared glasses and a big heart, around. I am ashamed to say that I cannot remember her name.

One evening we were holding vigil at the side of a young man that was dying from gunshot wounds. They had not yet found his family or friends and he was going to die whether alone or with them. We were not his blood or kin nor had we ever met him before, but this nurse said that we would hold vigil. 

He was on full life support and had been unconscious when someone drove to the ER entrance and dumped his body out of the car and onto the sidewalk and had never opened his eyes since. We didn't know his identity. He looked like a young teenage boy, maybe 15. 

We huddled around his bed, doing all of the things required to keep him alive-- managing the machines that kept him breathing, his fluids, his BP- while also talking to him and singing to him and reassuring this young man/boy whose identity we knew that we may not find while he was living. I became tearful many times and scooted quietly out of the room to calm myself. The doctor had told us that he had mere hours left to live and our actions were as much to soothe his soul as to care for his body. 

While in the hallway, I heard many of the other staff. They were making fun of the nurse and I that were taking care of this young man. I heard snippets from the doctors and nurses talking about how this young man was surely a gang-banger and didn't deserve this compassion. I was horrified. In my naiveté, I had imagined healthcare workers to have had boundless compassion. I was witnesses for the first time, the other side of healthcare, the jaded and exhausted side. 

But, that nurse, the lovely nurse who had taken me under her wing and was consoling a child who may never really hear her, told me a truth that I have carried with me for always. She told me that all humans have compassion. Some more and some less. We all carry the compassion that we are comfortable with and if we were to judge those in the hallway damning our actions, we were also judging them without compassion. 

And, so- we forgot those men in the hallway and we sang and calmed and loved on the boy we'd never met who in lay in the hospital bed before us until he took his final breath. 

I will never forget that moment, as long as I live. I was honored to hold that young man, a complete stranger, in his final moments. 

A Letter To My Muslim Patients From a Nurse

I do not work in a traditional nursing role. I am a public health nurse who goes into low-income areas and serves those in need. Many of my patients are refugees and immigrants but I also serve many who were born in this country. In a single day I may meet with five different families, each with a different language, skin color, culture and faith. I can say without reservation that this job is both the hardest nursing job that I've ever had and the most rewarding.

The most eye-opening part of this job has been getting to know so many different cultures, traditions and faiths. It has been such a great blessing in my life. Getting to know my Muslim patients has most certainly been one of those wonderful blessings.

I know that in post-election America, there is much uncertainty right now. I know that many groups of people, including those of the Muslim faith, are scared. I know. My refugee patients are scared. My immigrant patients are scared. My LGBT patients are scared. So many of us are frightened. And, yet- so much of the hate has been focused directly on you-- my Muslim patients.

You have told me during my patient visits that you are anxious for your children and if they will be harmed, panicked at the possibility of a Muslim registry and what that may mean for you, terrified to wear your hijabs in public and are sometimes simply too full of fear to leave your home at all. I am so terribly sorry for your sorrow and fear. In the past two weeks I have left our visits with a sinking pit of shame in my stomach for what the hate that is pervasive in this post-election country is doing to people that I care so much about.

If you are my patient, I have already told you that I care for you and that will you will always receive the same quality of care as that given to my other patients. I have hugged you and assured you that the election results will not impact our visits when you voiced concern. But, there is so much more that I want you to know.

I know that your faith is not one of violence and that the actions of a few do not represent the whole. According to the Pew Research Center, the population of Muslims around the world in 2010 was 1.6 billion. Yes, I said billion. If the growth of the Muslim population continues at the projected rate, by 2030 they will encompass a full quarter of the world's population. And yet, the violent actions of those in the name of the Islamic religion are few and far between. I know that as a Christian, I am not discriminated against each time that someone of the Christian faith commits a violent crime(which happens frequently) and, yet- you as a Muslim are discriminated against for each and every infraction of those who share your faith. It saddens me deeply that so many can judge you, my beloved patients who have shown me so much love and hospitality, for something that you had no control over and are as horrified by as we are.

You have the right to health care, education and all basic human rights and deserve that such things are provided by those whose judgment is unclouded by political judgment or discrimination of any kind.  I will provide that for you and so will the vast majority of other public servants. If you at any time feel that you are provided sub-par health care, education, safety services provided by police officers or fire fighters, etcetera; I hope that you will find the courage to speak out. I hope even more that you will never need to speak out as it is my firm belief that those serving the public should have the hearts of servants of ALL people.

I know that mental health impacts every facet of your life and that living within fear means that your mental health and physical health will be impacted each and every day while we persist in this volatile and discriminatory post-election world. I know that you may need more support through this time and I am determined to give that to you. You do not deserve these burdens placed on your already weary shoulders and I will do my best to stand beside you and help you in any way to shoulder that burden with you. I implore you to ask for help if you need it.

I know that we cannot lump any section of humanity together and imagine that they are all the same. As human beings, we are all originals and are unique. However, my time working with the Muslim population has led me to believe that those of the Islam faith as a whole are extraordinary people. I have never seen such hospitality before as I have seen going into the homes of my Muslim clients.  You may have very little and yet you will offer me the last food in your fridge, the only chair in your home and likely would offer me the very shirt off of your back if you felt that I needed it. I have never felt anything but love in the homes of my Muslim patients that I have been welcomed into. I am a kinder and gentler person because of you.

I believe that my job as your nurse does not end when our visit is completed. As a nurse, it is my job to advocate for my patients, especially those who may not be in a position to advocate for themselves.  I believe that all oppressive structures, such as the talk of a Muslim registry and  of the disallowing of Muslims into our country, should be decimated. I believe that you have every right to the same rights as every other human being in this country. I am not Muslim but I am committed to standing up beside you in every way that I can to ensure your safety.  When I casted my non-Trump vote on election day, I was not only voting for myself and my families, but I was voting for you, my patients, as well. I did not take that vote likely. I have been spending my days calling my elected officials on my lunch breaks to protest Bannon's appointment and any talk of a Muslim registry. I know that this is not enough. I promise to not stop my work until we all have equal rights. I know that as a straight white Christian woman that I can never understand what it like to be discriminated against for who I am but I will keep trying to eradicate the hate.

This letter will not solve your problems by any stretch of the imagination. It will not solve anything at all. I only wish to be a tiny light of love in your life in a time of great divisiveness and hate. I only wish to bring you a small amount of the love and joy that you, by being my patients and thus a part of my life, have brought me. I wish that I could also bring you peace. I promise to do all that I can to make that peace happen for you someday.

I stand beside you, my Muslim friends and patients, with love.

Nurse Mandi