The Good of it.

“There are more miracles than tragedies”

Someone at work said that a few months ago when a parent threw the usual line out: “I don’t know how you do it, it has to be so sad.”

Yeah, but it’s also totally amazing. I have fun at work every day.

There’s also the classic “it takes a special kind of person to do that, I could never.”

Well, I’m happy to do it. I’m honored to.

I know when people say these things, they’re well intentioned, and I know it’s hard to know what to say when pediatric hematology/oncology nursing is brought up in a conversation. But because our world loves to ask people what they do for a living in the first few minutes of a conversation, and you might meet me or someone like me someday, I want to reframe your perspective.

Can I take a moment of your time to take what our world may want to frame as something sad and turn it into something that’s sometimes sad, as all things are, but more often full of joy and love and light?

I want to bring something to your attention about my job, my patients, my purpose.

I want you to see it for the Good. The “big G” Good.

The Good of it is, of course, found in the big victory over cancer. The Good can be the bell ringing at the end of treatment, the joy in remission, the words “we found a match.” The Good is transplants finally engrafting, finding a pain medicine that actually works, and scheduled Zofran keeping the nausea at bay during chemo. It’s the little wins, like finding a pink princess toothbrush in the bottom of the donated goods basket, decorating a hospital door, and going downstairs for the Facility Dog Olympics. It’s wearing your own PJ’s to sleep through the worst of it, ordering birthday cake from dietary, and finding the last popsicle koozie in the family room when the chemo makes your fingers tingly. It’s smiles, laughter, jokes, and the ceiling tile I helped a kid paint at the end of treatment that says “cancer may have stolen my arm, but never my bedazzle” featuring the “sexy green M&M” (her words, not mine).

But, I want you to hear me out: there are more forms of the Good.

The Good is going home on hospice to see brothers and sisters without visiting hours, to be able to go out to the backyard and see the stars, and to eat dinner with your whole family again, instead of spending last days with nurses and fluorescent lights. The Good is the option to sleep through the painful end of a long and hard battle. The Good is a little girl running through the nurses’ station to tell her mom about her day at school, knowing she’s loved even if her mama doesn’t come home right now. It’s being told that though they relapsed, we have a protocol for that, there are options and we’re going to give it hell. It’s a parent getting to hold their child through it all. The Good more often than not, is simply never being alone through it all.

The best form of the Good is that any way it shakes out, they win their battles. Cancer never wins, ever. Sometimes the things that look like sadness are the Good too. It comes in so many beautiful, colorful, heart-wrenching forms.

My coworker’s answer of “there are more miracles than tragedies” stuck with me and I tacked it up here because it’s the easiest answer I’ve ever heard for how so much joy and love coexists with so much pain and sadness. So, each day, even when it’s hard and it’s heartbreaking, I’ve started to proclaim there are more miracles here, nothing but victory surrounds my patients and I.

When I pray for them every night, I pray for healing of course, but I also pray for hope, joy, friendship, love, and peace, no matter what happens. I proclaim victory over my kiddos their families in every small and large form possible. Sometimes all I pray for is one more good day, and that’s just enough.

I’ve known many patients who have won and still walk our broken earth, and I’ve known many patients who have won and walk in their chosen heaven. Either way, sickness and pain have lost, and the people who carry their memory have won from knowing and loving them.

There will be a cure, and until there is, we’ll be here to care. To rejoice and dance and sing and cry. That’s the coolest thing in the world.

There are more miracles than tragedies, and no one ever loses. That’s the Good of it. See sadness, but see past the sadness. See the Good, in all of its glorious forms. And stop saying “wow, I could never do that job, that sounds sad,” and instead say “that’s awesome, I bet those kids are great,” because they are. They’re so bafflingly great.