Compassion and Courage
Since 2010, I have served as a volunteer, nurse, and practitioner at Christ House. I found Christ House by chance late one night, as I scoured the AmeriCorps website for volunteer nursing roles. At the time, I was working straight night shifts as a surgical nurse at a busy hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During my training, it had been drilled into me that the only “real” nurses were those who worked in the hospital, and that the more acute the floor, the “better” you were. Between the grueling overnight hours and the patient load, I found myself fearful of going to work and disconnected from my patients who usually slept while I was there or who were acutely ill if awake during the night.
By chance, I was paired one evening with a patient living with schizophrenia and quite symptomatic from the condition. He experienced significant sleep-wake disturbance, which was likely exacerbated by being in the hospital, so he was up most of the night. He was chatty, disorganized, kind, and completely unaware that I was inexperienced and weighed down with imposter syndrome. Due to his surgical complications, he stayed several weeks in the hospital, and through his trust in me–a trust I did not deserve–I recognized that he invited me into the kinship of patient and practitioner relationship that made me feel connected and significant instead of lonely and incompetent. For weeks after he left, I laid awake, wrestling with wanting the “prestige” of working on a bustling, academic hospital floor, and yet knowing that my nursing call was to something simpler, yet perhaps more profound and more freeing. Several months after I applied to the nursing position at Christ House, I sold most of my belongings and packed two suitcases and one box to come with me to Washington D.C.
When I arrived at Christ House, I noticed a countercultural quality embodied by those who worked there. Whereas most people tend to withdraw from the pain of others, I witnessed a staff of practitioners, nurses, case managers, and chaplains that moved toward suffering, using a ministry of presence to foster trust and offer healing. I became part of a health care team living out Henri Nouwen’s definition of compassion, where “we are sent to wherever there is poverty, loneliness, and suffering to have the courage to be with people.”
At Christ House, this courage looks like wound care. Some of the wounds are physical– wounds laden with maggots from neglect, wounds from amputations, and wounds afflicted by knife blades and bullets. I have sat proximate to emotional and spiritual wounds–wounds that have formed from oppressive systems of racial hierarchy, economic injustice, food insecurity, and over-criminalization, that have broken the spirits of these men for whom we care. And I have seen the chronic, mental wounding that occurs when those living with symptoms of mental health conditions and substance use disorders, and / or those survivors of childhood abuse fail to receive the tender care they deserve. Yet Christ House is a place of compassion, a place where the courage and vulnerability of those for whom we care inspires me to be courageous and vulnerable myself. In this mutual vulnerability, healing occurs.
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