Dancing in the Mirrors

I don't know if I have told you all lately, but I LOVE my job. I get excited knowing I get to go to work. I love that we finally have wards full of patients and lives are changing. I don't have any pictures to share of patients yet but I did learn something great last night. Football (soccer) is a universal language. It can get slow at times on the ward and yesterday I had turned on the tv to see if we had a movie playing. I was flipping through the stations and when I got to the sports channel I looked behind me and there was a row of men and some younger guys with big eyes shaking their heads up and down. Needless to say, we all watched football together last night.

I have been working on the maxillo-facial ward and loving it. I have been able to take care of some amazing patients. The man I spoke of in my previous post who I had seen at the screening day with the large facial tumor had surgery on Tuesday. It was incredible to visit with him on the ward. It was incredible to see how he was able to eat. His tumor was larger than a grapefruit, coming out of top part of his mouth. His upper teeth were sticking out the tumor. It had only started growing four years ago. After his surgery he spent the night in the ICU on a vent. He was able to be extubated yesterday and is doing really well. I was working last night when his brother came in to see him for the first time. His brother looked at him and just cried. Tears of joy. Tears that are due to a life changed.

One of my favorite moments on the ward is when a patient returns from surgery and you give them a mirror. All the patients get a small mirror which they get to keep. Yesterday I had a 19 year old patient return from surgery who had a massive keloid removed which was hanging from his left ear. A keloid is an overgrowth of scar tissue that grows wild and doesn't stop growing. When he returned from surgery I gave him his mirror. Even though all he could see was the gauze dressing over his ear, he sat there with his mirror and just stared at himself. The same thing happened with another patient. A 16 year old boy who had a large tumor removed from the right side of his face. Now that his dressings are off, he lays in bed and stares at himself in his mirror. It's like they are getting to know themselves again. To live with these deformities for years and to now have the opportunity for a new life in many ways. What are they thinking when they lay in bed, unable to look away from themselves, from their new life?

I have yet to work a shift when I don't tear up over something. It really is a privilege to be able to work with the patients I get to work with. The other day I was helping a patient just stand after surgery. He is a pretty tall guy and actually speaks english. When we were standing there I asked him if he wanted to dance. He looked at me and said he liked hip-hop. Now there is something I wasn't expecting to hear. We danced. Yesterday I was talking with him again and asked if he wanted to dance. He looked at me with sad eyes and said no. He said he had finally looked in a mirror and now that he had seen himself he didn't want to dance. He said that when his momma sees him, she will just cry. She will cry buckets because of his scars. True, his lip is very swollen and he has a feeding tube coming out of his nose and he has some stitches on his face, but the swelling will go down, the feeding tube will come out and scars will fade and I pray that this man will dance again. That he will dance hip-hop with his momma, whom I am sure will be thankful that her son is here and is healthy and is alive.