nurse

Its been a decade since I first took this journey by foot, climbing obstacle over obstacle towards being a nurse, an epic largely of selfhood. As I took on God’s mission for my life, I had no idea what sort of challenges I would face. I could never have imagined such strange and purposeful events, hurdles and temptations would eventually turn me closer to my spirit and its Maker. So many times, I thought, God must not want this for me only to realize that in truth, the enemy would not want this for me. Its those truths that helped me charge on even when it seemed so ridiculous to even try.

All the shields I put up to protect myself, God knocked them down. He said, I will protect you.

All the layers I caked on my appearance, my persona, God peeled them back one at a time so I could see what I was doing. He says, but daughter, I made you.

All the obstacles I put in my own way, God stood there and said, “Really Sarah? …Really?”

Only after every stone had been turned, every false concept of my self had disproven, …only after I had completely broken down, I finally found the genuine courage and personal strength to trust God’s will for me. Only after I asked for His mercy, His grace and and His wisdom could I align my will with His and take joy in being justified. I had to trust His path and when I didn’t He still carried me.

Thank you God for carrying me through this. All of this.

[animals]

honor for the elder;
honor lost to law and lines on contracts
and facts.

an attic scent like damp wood and dusty boxes of pictures; things to help her remember who she is.
despite her demeanor (she claws at the strangers),
she is adorable. and scared.

left here unprepared,

she waits by the door;

waiting to be honored or be spared.~

woman in bed

Was this her last? Its easy to remember, easy to forget whose feet we are washing.

As the washcloth rubbed over her edematous soles, the cloth took with it a dingy orange residue, the texture and look of iodine.

She moaned as we turned her. All four, five of us to pull, push her from side to side. We cleansed her, not knowing who we cleansed. We bathed her, not knowing who we bathed.

God forgive me that i didn't have you more in mind.

Thank you God for even in this moment, is your will for me.

Forgive me that i didn't give more of that moment to you.

One eye averted from my business, I kept watch of the lab results, test results printing every so often...more bold, more red numbers...more negatives more parentheses.

Hours hour on; pacing by her room, I watch her monitors settle into their noise now crowded with neighboring noises as if the room is actually quiet.

But now God I have you in my mind.

Now God I'm reminded of why.

I give thanks even in these times. These troubles I give it to you, for I know not why but I know You. ~

nicu

…walks into a delicate trance;
slow motion witness,
mouthpiece cupped over mouth;
infant fights to live and life.
a cold mixture of death and depth
numbs the pace;
the prayers gets informal now;
oh God,
then the swiftness of grace;
i am a just a witness to this place. ~

breath

it occurred to me as it had not before (as summer morning wrestled with spring’s night, my mind delighted in the swirling tastes of meaning, existence, self-reliance and other misunderstandings),

the breath of life, beyond the first, testifies to will.

(like taking off a set of training wheels, pushing off on one’s own for the first time. like testing the waters, the strength in ones wings, we are given nothing more than a head start).

it appeals to me how the nerves expand and learn to thrive on curiousity and confidence. i adore how we cultivate, adding more to our spectrum by the life we find around us. in fact, diversity must be the greatest fertilizer.

it occurred to me, sensationally (the daring of fresh perspective), in one life we are both living and dying:

the first breath and the last, manifest in the hands of God
but the air between them hang in the balance of will.
Beside the occassional stirring of immortal fingers and the mysterious eyes of storms and of course, disease and physiology; largely, to accept life is optional.

leave your problems at the door

Prelude (explanation of the title page), The Scale:




I made 10 hours of time and a half today suffocating in a small hospital room with an innocent woman who thought she’d been rat-poisoned by a Wal-mart worker who followed her from Chicago because she’d won the lotto and the slithering Wal-mart lady was after her for the only four pennies she had left.
I took care of this woman but by “care”, I do not mean I bathed her. I did not help her with anything, really. I sat with her for 10 hours trying to keep her mind occupied on the cartoons; and off the clock or the window, or the thoughts in her head.
This is nothing new for me;
…Nothing new and not because I work there. I mean of course I’ve come across some crazy stuff in the eight years I’ve worked in healthcare: Thrown across rooms, bitten, kicked; punched; you name it.
That’s not what I’m really talking about.
In fact, being around those people takes me farther from my work and closer to the door where I left my proverbial baggage, next to the time clock.
And if we’re going to be brutal here, that old baggage is actually the thing which dragged me here to start.
At one time, yes, this was something new. Back then, (young and stupid) (audience nodding heads) I thought because I was so drawn to these people, I should help them somehow. I could devote my career to understanding them, their behavior; set up some nonprofit thing for other peoples’ old proverbial bags.
But now I know…
They don’t need some stupid .org, generously gifting 20 percent of proceeds to research (salaries of researchers). No psh! please… That makes them seem like monkeys or rats or something, minimizing them to their disease. I mean do we know these people? They aren’t monkeys. They aren’t that at all. They are actually far from foreign.
We, the “normal”, are just as screwed up and strange. It only so happens, I’m pretty good at speaking their language. or making their food,
12 deviled eggs
32 oz muddy black coffee
1/2 carton cheapest menthols
2 French bread pizzas
2 mg valium for a midnight snack
Let me tell you a little more.
I’ve been rather vague and when I am being vague on purpose,
I also tend to be long-winded. Forgive me.

Introduction, The Overhead Compartment:
My brother, who died when I was 12, suffered from manic depression, a life marked by season, pulled by weather… Inducing unmanageable moods.
Mike’s genes gave him this; brought down by his father and his father. Sadly, I knew very little about what ailed him, growing up. as a young girl, I don’t think I even knew he suffered.
When he died, I determined to know more. I wanted to understand this complicated mind. At the age of 13, I stumbled over a very enlightening book: Touched with Fire. It examined the dumbfounding link between madness and genius, citing case after case of remarkable people terrorized by voices and moods beyond their own power. While it was a bit too researchy and grownup for my pre-teen mind to wrap itself around, it also changed the way I saw the world and its aesthetics. Mike was a profound artist…could have easily been an architect, an engineer. He had these mystically detailed drawings…that just came up and out of the napkins he drew them on. his mind was magical, however troubled, as I came to understand.
And so are the minds of these suffering people…plagued with severe bouts of emotion, wretchedly damaging thoughts screaming at them and no one to turn off that damn noise. God, I’ve been there. Haven’t you? Not every day, I mean I don’t think rat poisoning is running through my veins but …I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some things that weren’t there a time or two.
Think about it
Well, it just blows me away…to live in this alt-reality. I wonder at what points in their lives they lucidly comprehend truth.
Or is it them who see perpetual truth, unwritten before us? Only explained in pictures, even those we don’t get. Truth so big that words are not heavy enough. colors they vividly impress us with, our knuckles pale for grasp. We fall short.
Chapter 2, Checked
My mom sat me down in the middle of a mall (where we’ve always shared life-altering conversations) one day and told me,
the person I thought was my (schmuck-for-a) dad actually wasn’t, and my real father didn’t know he had a daughter (which I later discovered was also not true, lol).
Before you jump up with an oh my god or what the hell…don’t worry, there was, in her well-laid defense, strong justification for the whitening out of facts.
Shortly after my parents split (never married), my dad turned out to be sort of a creep. One day she was at the mall in San Diego with toddler Mike. She tells me the whole time at the mall she felt followed…Looking around, feeling uneasy. At one point, she turned around and he’s right there, my dad, Joe.
But get this, he says to her;

Why did you follow me here?
(… uh… ….)
No … you followed ME here.
My mother locked the deadbolt after that day, even slept in her living room with a baseball bat.
Fast forward, 16 years later… Phoenix, the middle of another mall, my mother and I sat. In my hands, I cupped truth and irony (the irony, an entirely separate blog post lol). Months later, I set out to find this man, Joe. After all, he had the right to know about me.
After writing to several Pitkat’s (his last name) across the country, I finally found my father (relatives I’d apparently written to found him for me). He wrote me a letter. I knew it was coming, this letter I’d been waiting and hoping for…still checking the mailbox that day, it seemed so out of the blue. On yellow legal pad paper, Joe explained to me, he’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when attending the University of New York, years ago (majoring in English and Art History…what I also majored in at the time).
Creepy mall story, finally made sense.
The Duffle:
The genius and magic once glittering around mental illness, as I perceived it, quickly faded into a murky hopeless pit with vacant eyes as I endured a year or so dabbling in father-daughter relationship.
Joe marveled me, nonetheless, with his fascinating talent of turning this tragic, deep, dark disease into something…almost, beneficial. Indeed, his mania seemed to get him a lot of things (leather couches, drugs in the mail) and out of a lot of things (prison, state hospitals, guardianship). I could never figure out if he was just manipulative or if the poor man was being told by several scary voices in his head to be this manipulative. Either way, being schizo had its perks, at least for him. Innocent by the name of his disease yet guilty by the genius behind the scheme. Every untruth worked to protect him.
And so be it, shit. If you have to live with shadows and the phone talking to you all the time, my God, have a beer. Ya know? Collect political buttons, blow a lot of money. Whatever. Take your drugs, get your government check. I can’t say I wouldn't!
It’s survival. There are these schizophrenics who seem to be in this state of survival, often. Like pigeons, they rummage and never stay in one place for long. They know they need shelter and cigarettes, food on occasion and all of these they’ll find because they have to. They don’t have the capacity to live in a society based on earnings; career; monetary success; picket fences. Money would never be their friend; in fact it would kill a dying man. And drugs don’t really help either because their mind is the thing which is already high.
In its raw, frazzled state, genius abounds and so in its natural wild, this creature transforms canvas to art. puts its stamp on life that says: THIS IS WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. And we the “normal”, stand before it in pencil skirts and legal pads, criticizing a level of genius we know nothing about. (Written off simply, insanity) In museums and studios across the globe, we buy framed complicated concepts and hang them on our walls so that we appear more genuine and sophisticated.
Meanwhile sleeps the loon in its empty sea of padding, overmedicated, tamed by tazer now after the weeklong episode which finally manifested into the painting which you spent 7000 dollars on. But they’ll get better. They have lots of doctors blending precise concoctions of antipsychotics for the individual, an art itself. Somehow, these ungrounded spirits settle into their illusions…Befriending, if possible, the spiders and snakes, shadows and voices. Befriending the enemy, still never sleeping sound without its haunt.
The Claim
I don’t want to help them anymore,
but when I’m around them, as they should stumble into my rocky ascent, I want to know how they can help me.
So I always start with the universal truth: Art.
Do you paint, I asked the woman?
Her eyes lit up. It seemed to bring her the most joy in those ten hours; sharing with me, the beauty she creates – the light she’s made for her darkness.
I don’t try to understand anymore. I don’t have to know how she’s helped and why she’s here with me and not the other way around. I watch the clock as she watches cartoons. I look for the door, eager to claim my proverbial baggage, get the hell out of here.
Nothing new.
Getting the hell out got me here, watching the clock, the door. There’s no rat poisoning coursing my veins but my father’s blood taught me something. Mike’s suffering, the book I read, the dizzying list of illed people I’ve met, from it all I’ve learned. Winged things live in the most vivid spectrum; they live inside the rainbows we chase and we’ll never get that close to the truth. We don’t fly.

[training camp]

this evening is my first day on the job. the training trial period, sort of like life:
preparing
for some heavenly duty of sorts; a military nurse for God. The idea is to go
and pick up the wounded angels of Armageddon running along the front lines, (some dimension
prepared just for this) pulling them aside, relieving them of their armor.
i’ll take out my bag of tricks: God’s morphine and His tourniquet. Now and until then, he tells me his potions
are potent and his pre-hospital care is powerful … so i start with this. its small but its a start
and its taken me long enough to conjure up some sense of purpose.


you first have to realize you are small
your big plans are skepticism. your small ones, volunteer work.
your life is a resume; practicing in the mirror for the long awaited interview
i could be wrong but i’m not
i could be wrong but what if i’m not


i tucked in my polo shirt which i never do but they never have uniforms in extra small or even small, because uniforms were not meant to be customized or to fit. i tried to fit the profile, hair tucked away in bun, slippery nose with falling glasses.
i tried to look pressed, ironed, worthy. i go to open the cottage door (cottage is their term for
anything not plastered with stucco and pink paint; not uniform) but its locked. Of course. I knock and a woman twice my age but shorter opens the door, baring the same tucked polo, thrift store khakis hemmed, sliding thick rimmed glasses with question-mark eyes.

You must be the new girl.

yes, yes of course
in time with the persona.


you then have to realize where you fit
because some people learn best in quiet light,
others in do or die situations.
and God lets us figure that out
through one painted window at a time


immediately, i felt awkward, like an intruder. sorry. this was a quiet place with
musky, milk glass lighting; antique static. the living room straightened with old people in rows
of withered skin and aimless eyes. they don’t say hi or welcome me because they don’t know
me but they know that much. Dusty roses and muted green damask tapestry stuffed tautly
forming against their bony backs, paints a false picture. Fake flowers abound, the TV
is just on and a waxy wipe-off calendar blares pathetic goals for each day:

exercise, Thursday the 1st.
bingo, Friday the 9th.

Today is staring off into space with applesauce and Respiradol dried to corners of cracked speechless lips and blank daydreams shuttering only by anything familiar and nothing here is… but that’s not written on the calendar.


the next ambition is discovering falsity,
because where one hopes many doubt.
this will take a lifetime to sift through
but with earnest virtue you will.
if you love this, than you will.


she leads me into the medication room and in my loud young limbs and pin-tucked mouth, i ask too quickly:

what do you want me to do.

let me put some of them to bed and then i’ll show you around.

so i sat there observing, tarrying with the moments passing. is this God’s idea or mine?
i’ve already judged the room and my place in it: too fake. too boxy; plastic antiques. replicas of
comfort. its a shade too quiet for my age and i’m a tad too quick for their hands.
i can’t take it anymore:


Ya know i can help; i don’t want to just sit here.

well that one needs to be changed; she goes at the very end of the hall behind you on the right.
she’s pretty easy but use a high pitched voice, she likes to be pampered.


what is she talking about? i’ve never even held a baby. i’m too proud to ask. i reach for the cold clammy creature, walk with her down the hall. young and old, new and used. its sort of purposeful like Mary and Elizabeth; we’re fulfilling something… perhaps me.

last you realize small hands do big things
your place is where God puts it
The truth is in the moment, what you skim from the top of it.
i could be wrong but i’m not.
and we’re all just really practicing, aren’t we?

i caught on to the quietness. they live in dreams of things that made sense once. so i pretend
with her. its the only thing i could think to do. are we in the 40′s maybe? two young damsels
glorifying our best features in a powder room, fixing a loose hem, a snagged stocking:

here let me help you with that.
i fumble with the washcloth; well this is awkward. what? God i don’t know.

wait Hon’, umm..you’ve got a punch stain your dress.

Oh thank you sweetheart, she says to me.

Can you believe she said thank you? and here i am sweating and shaking trying to work with this discomfort: the interplay of dignity and delirium.

it wasn’t bad for a first day; i broke my own mold and washed the feet of God for the first time.~

[naked art]

written about a man and his art...someone i shared a day with once, touched my heart deeply.

with fists he 
claims the courage 
in raw configued art.
naked in front 
of spews of 
bodies, pointing at 
her painting.
with words he 
calms her dignity,
trashed by the
 ignorant mass.
jaded in front
of spews of bodies,
she can not hide
her face. ~