Training as a nurse at eighteen, cold floors and weak tea, and learning that most of the work is calm.
I trained as a nurse the year I turned eighteen, on a ward where the floors were always cold and the tea was always weak. I had wanted to do it since I was small, though if you had asked me why I could not have told you. I think I liked the idea of being useful in a way that could not be argued with.
The training was hard in a way they do not allow anymore. The matron could stop you in a corridor and inspect your shoes, and a crooked seam was a moral failing. We made beds with corners you could bounce a coin off, and we did it again if it was not right. I grumbled like everyone else, but I will tell you a secret: I was proud of those corners. There is a satisfaction in a thing done properly that has stayed with me my whole life.
People think nursing is about medicine. Most of it is about staying calm in front of someone who is frightened, and holding a hand long enough that they believe you. I learned to read a room before I read a chart. You can tell a great deal from how a family stands around a bed, who does the talking and who does the worrying, who has not eaten.
The night shift was its own country. The hospital went quiet and the work went slow and strange. You sat with people in the small hours when everything feels worse, and you learned that the kindest thing is often just to be there and not to rush. I sat with a good many people at the very end, more than I could count now, and I came to think of it as a privilege, though I would not have used that word at the time. To be the one who is there. To make sure no one goes out into the dark on their own.
I nursed for nearly forty years, in one form or another. I delivered babies and I closed eyes and I did everything in between. If a life can be measured in the hands it has held, then mine has been a full one.