Chapter 58 September
MIA
September eighth arrived on a Monday.
I had been telling myself I was ready for it since the acceptance letter. I found out the difference between telling yourself you are ready and actually being ready standing in the Hamilton Regional parking lot at seven forty five in the morning with my bag on my shoulder and the building in front of me. The door I had been walking toward for months was right there now, actual and solid and requiring me to walk through it.
I walked through it.
The nursing program occupied the east wing of the main building. Third floor. The accelerated cohort was twenty two students and we assembled in a classroom that smelled like new textbooks and the particular neutral cleanliness of a room prepared for people who had not arrived yet.
I sat third row, left side.
Not the front because I was not going to perform eagerness. Not the back because I was not pretending I was not here for real reasons.
The program director opened the first session with something I wrote down before she finished the sentence.
You are not here to learn about illness, she said. You are here to learn about people who happen to be ill. The illness is the context. The person is the work.
I wrote it down and read it back and thought about Mom. About two years of pill organizers and pharmacy lines and waiting rooms. About the cancer center receptionist who called her Mrs. Lin, first name, every single time, like she was a person before she was a patient.
That was the whole thing.
That was what I was here to learn to do on purpose.
The first week was orientation and fundamentals. Not clinical work yet. The language and the frameworks and the baseline competencies the program required before they trusted you near an actual patient. I did not mind the pace. I understood that the foundation had to come before anything built on it, and I had learned this year that patience with process was not the same as indifference to the outcome.
I called Caleb every evening.
He was four days into his contract program when I started. He had already found the rhythm of the new place the way he found the rhythm of everywhere he went now, with a directness that had replaced the performing version of himself from a year ago.
How is it, he said the first night.
Real, I said. Like Halifax was real. Just floors and hallways and twenty one other people who are here for the same reason.
Are they good, he said.
Some of them, I said. There is a woman named Priya who sat next to me in the first session and spent the break asking questions I had not thought to ask yet. She is going to make me better at this.
Good, he said. That is what the right people do.
How is the ice, I said.
Excellent, he said. The coaching staff is more specific than anything I have had before. They do not tell you something is wrong without explaining exactly why and exactly what the correction is.
Do you like that, I said.
I love it, he said. It is the opposite of how my father coached. He told you something was wrong and left you to figure out the why, because figuring it out alone was the test. I never knew if I was learning or just surviving.
I sat with that.
He talked about his father more easily now. Not constantly and not with drama. Just when it came up, the way you reference something that shaped you without making it the center of every conversation.
That was the year doing what the year did.
Mom called on Wednesday.
She was at the kitchen table. I could tell from the echo of the room.
How is it, she said.
Good, I said. Challenging. Real.
Good, she said. That is what it should be.
Walter brought soup today, she said. He tried a new recipe.
How was it, I said.
Still slightly too salty, she said. But less than before. I told him it was excellent. She paused. I have decided encouragement is more effective than honesty at this particular stage.
I laughed.
The real one.
Mom, I said.
Mia, she said.
I miss you, I said.
I know, she said. I miss you too. And you are exactly where you are supposed to be. Both of those things are true.
The first clinical observation was in week three.
Not hands on yet. Shadowing senior nurses on the ward, watching without intervening, learning the rhythms before being trusted to participate. The ward was general medical and not oncology yet, that was the spring placement, but the principles were the same.
I watched a nurse named Danielle work a six hour shift.
She was twenty nine and had been on the ward for four years and she moved through it with the economy of motion that comes from doing something long enough that your body knows the job. But what I watched most was not the technical work. It was the way she stood in a patient's doorway before entering. One breath. Whatever was in the hallway stayed in the hallway. She was fully present inside the room before she said a word.
I have been doing that, I realized.
For two years at the cancer center without knowing it had a name.
After the shift Danielle found me in the corridor.
You watch differently from the others, she said.
How do they watch, I said.
They watch the procedures, she said. You watch the patient.
I have been a patient's family for two years, I said.
She nodded slowly.
That is either the best preparation or the hardest, she said.
Both, I said.
Yes, she said. Usually.
I texted Caleb from the corner on the walk home.
I think I am going to be okay here, I said.
His reply came in under a minute.
I knew that before you left, he said.
I know you did, I said.
Same time tonight, he said.
Same time, I said.
I went home.
Mom's breathing was four hours away and I did not count it through a wall.
I trusted it.
That was new.
That was the whole year showing up in the most ordinary way it could find.