Being a Nurse in the War and Then Becoming a War Nurse
Dear readers,
It’s time for my thoughts from the island.
Over the last few weeks, a beautiful and most important song has come back to my mind. I sang along to Pink's 'Dear Mr President', released in 2006. I sang along in the car, shower, and kitchen. I sang the words to this amazing song (well, I tried to sing them).
Eighteen years after its first release, this song still speaks the truth and tugs at my heart — my Florence Nightingale heart. It was originally written for and about George W. Bush, but I feel like it could be addressed to any president or political leader in the world.
This month’s column is about our healthcare colleagues working in extreme situations such as warzones. I have chosen to focus on this area because I recently read a paper from the Physicians for Human Rights, which stated that the number of healthcare professionals being killed in conflict situations is increasing globally.
We all watch the news. We watch with shock at the terrible destruction and loss of life. Then, I think about the healthcare professionals working in these war-torn countries. How can it be that they have to live through this horror and pay with their own lives when all they want to do is save people? Even writing these lines is a challenge. It's so hard to understand, hard to get my head around. It doesn't make any sense.
When I nursed and cared for during the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought, ‘Yes, I am a war nurse’. Like the nurses who served in the Great War and World War 2. I felt like I was fighting for my people, my patients, and my country — Great Britain. 4 years down the line, our colleagues in other parts of the world who survived COVID-19 and served their countries as nurses, doctors, midwives, physiotherapists and so on, are now struggling to survive the bombs that are being dropped on them every day. This time, it’s not a virus they are up against; it’s a war caused by politics!
Dear Mr President, come take a walk with me….
What I see on the news is completely incomprehensible to me. Hospitals are smashed to pieces, bombs are dropped on medical facilities, which are places of healing, treatment, nursing, care, and empathy. We see hospital staff covered with blood; we see beds and floors crowded with the critically wounded; we see patients dying; we see doctors and nurses working without essential medical equipment; we see children and mothers crying. Nurses, doctors, and midwives are pushed to the most extreme limits and are still there working, fighting for their patients. My deepest sympathies go out to them all, to their families, to all the people caught up in these awful circumstances.
Dear Mr President, come take a walk with me….
As a nurse, I find it almost impossible to avoid becoming political when I see my fellow healthcare professionals on the news, facing these horrors. I find it impossible to shut my eyes and cover my ears when it’s all there on the TV, online, and in the newspapers when I know what's happening to these people.
How can any politician live with this bloodbath, with this wreckage, this ruin, with the deaths of hundreds of nurses, doctors, midwives, and thousands of civilians and soldiers too? Is this the legacy they want to leave behind? Nothing else?
Dear Mr President, come take a walk with me….
STOP NOW, MR PRESIDENT!
Sabine
