a chance encounter launches a second career as a nurse By Adam Pike, BSN I hAD bloWn oFF GRADuATe sChool FoR A semesTeR was far more ill than the rest. As she disappeared in an and moved in with a friend living in northern Honduras, impromptu room the staff conjured from panels of spare ostensibly to spend time developing my Spanish language drape, i saw patches of dark bruises climbing her forearms. skills. We occupied a small one-room, key-lime concrete As the evening passed, my friend napped, and i vent- block, completely permeable for a variety of local fauna. ured behind the white curtains to offer anything i could A coconut tree was visible from our small stoop on which – really, nothing – to the young woman breathing through i sat during many afternoons while rain rattled the metal a mask and her mother, her only company. For what roof like a snare drum. We washed our laundry with a followed, nothing could have prepared me. We conversed, washboard and cistern in the company of chickens, dogs traded stories, said prayers. owned by no one, and playful, kind neighbors who i left the building to breathe and had scarcely been regarded us as a kind of novelty. outside for more than a moment when someone had come it was the perfect environment in which to pull back to retrieve me, saying the young woman and her mother from familiar routine and plunge into academics and art- had asked for me. it seemed even the air had changed since istry. i carried out this mission somewhat anonymously in i had left a moment before. The woman’s mother waved our austere apartment, with the exception of trips for fruit me over to join her and the circle of women gathering on to the ancient wooden cart at the corner, or perhaps to the cue and sounding prayerful chants. pharmacy to remedy the inevitable abdominal maladies The young woman asked me to hold her hand, and i that occur for foreigners. did, kneeling down at her right side. She said, “Vamos a orar.” of the many bouts of illness we fought, only one was We are going to pray. And we prayed, with few words. She potent enough to warrant a hospital stay. on this occasion, raised my hand into the air with hers, and then, it was my as i stood in the dilapidated public er, looking down at hand that held hers. Her final breath brushed across my face, my sick friend in his hospital bed, i saw a young Honduran through my hair, and then far beyond me, the room, and woman wheeled through the entrance of the er and im- the building. After the nurse had taken the woman away, mediately placed in a vacant bed adjacent to my friend. in i gave the mother a hug, and then left once again for the this open room, filled with patients suffering from dengue outside air – this time for a long breath. fever, dehydration, and physical trauma, it was immedi- i recall feeling overwhelmed with emotion, but not dis- ately clear this pale, sweating woman, desperately gasping, turbed. i felt honored that this woman allowed me into one 42 bellarmine magazine
Bellarmine Magazine_Fall2012
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