I found a soulmate in an unlikely place The suffering of others should put a damper on any reasonable romance, even in the 1980s. Dating at the workplace, particularly in the burn intensive care unit, seemed against the rules. As date candidates go, I may not have been an obvious choice. A new nurse, male, I was one of the very few in 1984. We men in nursing were rare at the time; novel and slightly unnerving, a shade absurd, explanations about our existence were often required. I was a novice to New York City, struggling to keep my head above water. Days into orientation, I first became aware of this young woman when the child she was feeding suddenly died. The pediatric patient had been terribly scalded a month before and her cardiac arrest was an unanticipated horror. I watched from the hallway as this young nurse floated in and out of the increasing desperate tumult of the code. After about an hour, the little girl was pronounced dead by a surgical resident, his ashen face streaked with tears. The nurse was left to clean and wrap the small child's lifeless body, helped by a few RNs with more experience. I did not speak to her about the death of the child early on as I lurched in fits and starts through orientation. At the end of the eight-hour shifts of training, I would migrate home to my shabby shared apartment in Brooklyn and sit spent in the fading autumn light in a borrowed and faded armchair. I would fall asleep exhausted in the early evening, waking in my clothes in the small hours of the night. Showering, I would return to my room to smoke and await the dawn, sipping coffee, steeling myself to return to work. My old theatre-school-friend apartment mate became rapidly distant and irrelevant amidst the swirl of the new work. At the hospital, she seemed to glide above the fray. Tall people tend to notice one another. Almost six feet, five twelve as she characterized it, she was modest and gracefully beautiful. Trained as a ballet dancer, she was a touch goofy, her sharp features framed by soft blond hair cut short, a slight gap in her straight teeth a trivial imperfection that amplified the symmetry of her face. We discovered we had the same 36-inch inseam, the white cotton scrub pants issued to both of us left our ankles exposed on the unit. We found ourselves often bound together in shared assignments as we cleansed and debrided our mutual patients, managing their sedative and vasoactive drips, calibrating with the tips of scalpels the iridescently lit green cardiac monitors. We learned to choreograph our movements to the variable rhythms of burn intensive care. In addition to the burned, a new population, their immune systems shattered, began to migrate into our cloistered unit. As the AIDS epidemic flowered, more and more young people arrived with reactions to medications that resulted in their skin sloughing in sodden filmy sheets. Their airways clogged with bloody secretions, they were placed on ventilators. These patients, like those with large burns and inhalation injuries, were effectively silenced; their mute protests and cries transformed into honking protests from the ventilator as it labored to push air in and out of their stiffening lungs. Most died. She and I went on in parallel, winding our way through the days and nights in the bright tank room and at the dimly lit bedsides of the ICU. During my first year, following the death of a child under my care, my roommate from my theatre school life came home to our apartment to find me weeping in grief, rage, and self-recrimination. Tormented by what I might have missed, what I might have done, I too, like my fellow nurse a year before, had felt the sting of wrapping a child's lifeless body; accusing blank eyes open and lost disappearing behind a zipper drawn up prior to the transfer to a cold morgue in the subbasement. My roommate, he could not know what to say, but my workmate, she could. Yet she did not say a word. Not yet. Raw after the sentinel event, the death, I would not speak of it. However, she knew, we knew. Through the months working, we fermented in other failed romances, resisting each other even as we sometimes went out for a drink or two or three after work. Unleashed from the unit after a 12-hour shift we would gulp frozen Margaritas on empty bellies, aching with thirst. Desire, longing, the grotesqueness of our shared circumstances swirled together in our loosening consciousness as we leaned in to hear the other in the dim of the bar. After a few hours, we would stumble out onto the sidewalks, our hands sliding away from each other as we began our separate journeys home on the clattering subway. "Remember," I said to myself, "Do not spoil it. She is your friend, and you shouldn't date at work." Yet, my work friend was becoming my companion. In the unit, she would linger in the rooms, a white gown tied around her back, a blue hat with her blond hair tucked underneath, a mask over her mouth and nose, her bright, light brown eyes above. Raised by a pair of eastern Wyoming Lutherans, she ground out the work. She would soothe the patients in her soft drawl, urging then on, quieting them by name; Mr. this and Miss that -- the infants Baby this and Baby that, first names preferred. Her lightness, her ability to see beyond the wounds animated the people beneath, their personhood hidden by the fury of their injuries -- her mercy pulled back the veil. We continued to tread carefully with the other for two years; across bedsides, across rooms, in the midst of the tank room as we lifted and slid the patients from the table to the bed, rolling them back to their rooms where we would tuck them away, finding ourselves bound more and more to one another. Finally, at the Christmas party in 1986, we hesitantly fit ourselves together, the snowflakes drifting by the window in gentle clouds in her bright apartment high above the city. We shielded our furtive romance from our co-workers. Soon after we began, at the end of a long shift sitting on a bench in the locker room, I found a card tucked in my bag. Opening it, I found a silly Valentine, the first I had received since my teenage years. She did not play by the rules. Romance began to seep into the dark corners of our days on the unit. At home, falling asleep at night after the long days at work, her head on my shoulder, my mind would seethe with dreams, squirming in an attempt to bring order. Awakening with her, gazing out over the shadowed buildings, the sharp edges of these visions would ease. In embracing each other, we enlisted in a covenant of hope, of better days. We married in 1989 in the UN chapel at Christmas time, our families, friends, and fellow nurses together in a reception in a rented loft apartment downtown. A master's degree completed, she began her time as the educator for Burn and Trauma. I stayed at the bedside. In 1992, we moved to a cottage overlooking the Hudson River. In 1994, 10 years after we first met in the burn unit, after the first of our three children was born, she returned to the unit. Through the years, we were separate but together: We worked on alternate days, one at a time, five or six days a week, the other at home with our children. In the months following Sept. 11, 2001, arriving home late at night, the bedside report we gave was delivered in our own, perched above the river, our infant daughter asleep in one of our arms. The unit churned, the wounded patients retreated into delirious and feverish reveries, critical illness and treatments acting in synergy to loosen their minds as the doctors and nurses labored to save their lives. Twenty-two years after we began, our own home burned while we were on vacation. Leaving my family at the beach, I flew back alone to a charred ruin. The front door was fractured and splintered by firefighters, the electric cables severed, the batteries in the failing smoke alarms mournfully keened as if in protest. It seemed so familiar: the smell of it, the filth, the ceiling collapsed onto our bed, our comforter stained with soot and wreckage. The photographs of our lives together blasted from the wall by fire hoses and lay twisted and blurred in our backyard. After a few days of salvage, I flew back to my wife and children and slowly we drove north. Temporarily without a home, we stopped in Washington. Wandering in the hazy late summer evening, we reveled in the preposterous joy of our safety, secure that we were together with our children unwounded and away. Through the decades, we have continued to work, gathering degrees and experience with our nursing colleagues. Since 1984, between 30,000 and 40,000 burn patients have been admitted, discharged, or died, hundreds of nurses have come and gone, a few have stayed, and three other nurse couples have married. All are married still. We were not alone in discovering like-minded souls at work. Countless times following her at work, I have heard from patients and new nurses about my wife, they often not knowing we were married. They would tell me about what she had done, what she had said, how she was. Her work with burn patients has been a testament to her character and desire; it has tried her resolve and exposed her heart. The work has ever bound us to one another. Together we have gazed out over the terrible and miraculous landscape, sheltering one another always; travelers along the same path. She has always reminded me of what was possible; her smile lit the promise of better days as we discovered love in intensive care. Source
