Sunday, April 10, 2016

IF I COULD TURN BACK TIME

Yesterday I took a walk back in time, to my student nursing days at Riverside-White Cross Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. I'd recently been contacted by a former classmate who had been gathering data and searching for former students in order to organize a gathering for the 45th (I can scarcely believe it) anniversary of graduation from nursing school. She emailed a list of those people she'd found and the summations of their lives after graduation. I read every classmate's entry and then had a good cry. Why cry? Because we were so young, straight out of high school, and had high hopes and pie-in-the-sky dreams for how we were going to help people and change the world - at least our little corners of it, but after graduating, we'd gone separate ways. Many of my classmates had lost their husbands, in fact, my roommate's spouse had succumbed to cancer and I'd had no idea since we hadn't corresponded after we graduated. Some had retired from nursing or changed professions altogether. Many, like myself, had interrupted their careers to raise children, and quite a few had achieved advanced degrees and were still working but hoping to soon retire.    

We all have hopes and dreams, but then reality hits us square in the face and though some dreams are realized, many are not. I don't consider unfulfilled dreams as life failures, but rather interventions of realities like marriage, children, illnesses, crises, and family losses along the way. Many of those things cannot be avoided, but some are due to decisions we make ourselves. I wondered how my life might have been different had I been able to take an R.N. position at Riverside after graduation, as many of my classmates had. That's where I'd wanted to work, but my spouse had lived and worked in Dayton, Ohio, so after we married (just prior to my graduation) and after his Army days were over, he whisked me away from what I knew, to the place he knew. It was the way things were done back then. Women followed their husbands. Still, I do wonder how different life might have been had I lived and worked in the town where I was raised and where my family continued to reside. I would have been at a familiar hospital among people I'd known since my junior high school days volunteering as a Candy Striper right there at Riverside. It was also a fact that Riverside Hospital gave preference to their own graduates.     

At the end of the classmates' summations was the list of those we had lost to death. I'm not sure why that stunned me, but it did. I know death is as much a part of life as birth, yet these were girls I'd lived with for years. We were dorm neighbors and friends. We had worked together, studied together, taken tests together, eaten meals together, laughed together, and cried together. We had supported each other when boyfriends had been sent to Viet Nam, family members had passed, and when we were just sure we had failed important exams. During our years in nursing school, we had tragically lost two classmates - one had taken her own life right there in the dorm, and the other had died in a sledding accident over Christmas break in our junior year. Those losses were jarring to all of us, but even after all these years, learning about further losses had stung. One classmate had died just a few years after graduation after surviving brain surgery and a stroke during her time in nursing school. I couldn't comprehend that she had done all that studying, spent all those hours working on the patient floors, worried and fretted about getting through....only to live such a short time afterward. It was more than I could process yesterday and I had a bit of a meltdown.

Today is better, and I know I can't go back or change anything from the past. I'm grateful for the time spent with those girls - now grown women, mothers, and grandmothers - though at times I had wished to be anywhere but there in the dorms and classrooms. As students, we often mused about being married, living in cozy homes, cooking, cleaning, and washing dishes. We thought that would surely make us happier than living in a dorm and working in the hospital or dealing with the "aroma" and the sights in the lab, or studying until the wee hours every single night. How naïve could we have been? 

These are some graduation photos from one of our yearbook pages. I'm the first one on the left in the second row. How young we were.  I wonder why nurses don't wear caps anymore? We earned those!     


 

2 comments:

Michelle said...

It is always wonderful to relive the memories. Sorry to hear that the passing of your classmates caused you anguish. Thank you for sharing

Kady said...

Thank you, Michelle. I've often thought about my former classmates and looked up some of them on Facebook, as I did with high school classmates. Even when school has been so far in the past, it's still very sobering to learn of the losses. It makes me even more grateful for every day.