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Most people go into the healthcare field because they want to help people who are sick. But being a nurse is a very unglamorous job sometimes. It means treating all manner of wounds, cleaning up after people, and being exposed to infectious diseases on a daily basis. It takes a strong stomach and an iron constitution. There are long hours. You’d better have sensible shoes because you’re on your feet all day. Sometimes, patients die. But then again, sometimes they’re saved.
It is a psychologically demanding job featuring frightened children, overwrought parents, and newly grieving widows. Treating the obvious illness is only the first step. Nursing means treating the whole person. On a daily basis a nurse is exposed to the best people have to offer, and to the worst. Nurses and other medical professionals are some of the most sought after volunteers, just as they are some of the most sought after workers at home. The unique skill set is always needed. Thinking about the intense challenges a nurse faces at work, it’s incredible to think that some of them also seek out those challenges in their free time, in war-torn places or lands reeling in the aftermath of a natural disaster. A nurse who volunteers is a special kind of hero.
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Take, for example, Julie Bostrom, an emergency room nurse and mother of two who spends her vacations traveling all over the world to provide aid to people in need. She treats children in Ethiopia, Honduras, the Middle East, China, and India. Most of the work she does is through the organization Operation Smile, providing reconstructive surgery for children who are born with facial deformities like cleft palates or cleft lips. These conditions can be successfully corrected with appropriate surgery. In the U.S. cleft palates and lips are usually repaired before a newborn even leaves the hospital. In many countries, however, poverty or a lack of facilities, supplies, and medical personnel prohibit the procedure. This relatively simple surgery can completely change the life of a child who has struggled to make friends and has been stigmatized as damaged goods.
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Bostrom, in a profile for The Source Weekly, describes her experience talking with the Iraqi mother of a sick child. The woman was wearing a burqa and Bostrom felt disconnected from her. But as they began to talk about their children, commiserating about the challenges of raising kids, they connected, woman-to-woman. She says, “That’s why I do it. We were two totally foreign people to each other. The burqa, you feel like it’s a wall, yet here I am holding her hand and she’s giving me a hug.”