Free Vatican Waltz by Roland Merullo Page A

naturally. It’s a precarious time, the last half of the last year of nursing school. You’re trying to soak up and hold as much information as you can, you’re under constant scrutiny, already thinking about taking the Boards and applying to the hospital of your choice. The competition is stiff (though there is a particularly strong sense of camaraderie among nursing students). So the very last thing you need is to give any sign that you’re flaky, unstable, even overly emotional. The people who will decide your fate—mostly senior nurses, but certain physicians and professors as well—are watching you for any signs that you won’t be able to handle the real trials of the profession: the long hours, the life-or-death decisions, the blood and guts and smells and complaints, the everyday, unspectacular, quietly efficient care that can make the difference between a patient walking out of the hospital unassisted and sinking deeper into his or her troubles. Does Piantedosi regularly check the charts? Does she wash her hands enough, even when she’s under pressure to get to the next patient? Can she insert a catheter into a man who’s afraid and upset? Can she keep her focus through a four-hour intestinal operation?
    Those are the kinds of things that decide your fate, not, Can she cut someone’s pain in half by placing a hand on his shoulder?
    So I never mentioned it to anyone—friend, superior, or coworker. I tried to deny it at first, even to myself. But then I understood how selfish that was, and I kept hearing Father Alberto chastising me about false modesty, and I started to let the healing energy move through me without so much resistance. One of my patients was an older man suffering from late-stage emphysema. He had an almost unbearable amount of trouble breathing, probably a week to live. Patients always have quirks, and his quirk was that he liked to lie there with one leg outside the sheet. I’d go in, and if there was no one else in the room, I’d put my hand on his right leg and I’d notice immediately that his vital signs would change. His breathing was still labored, but less so; his heartbeat dropped from the high 100s to something closer to normal.
    It wasn’t as though I could stand there beside his bed for a whole shift, touching him, and it wasn’t as though I could go around from room to room, fondling patients who were in pain. Sometimes I wanted to. It’s one of the hardest aspects of a nurse’s life—being around so much suffering and not always being able to completely take it away. There were days when I had an urge to grab a nurse-supervisor by the arm, drag her into a room where someone was suffering, and say, “Watch this.” But I suspected that the response would be something like “No,
you
watch
this
” as I was banned from the hospital and thrown out of school. I suspected, too, that if there was even the smallest element of egotism involved, the tiniest bit of showing off, then whatever healing magic God was sending through me would immediately be extinguished.
    So I did what I could, surreptitiously putting my hands on the patients who seemed to need it most, never when there was anyone else nearby. Some patients noticed. One woman—she’d been in a car accident and had a broken collarbone and a broken pelvis—said, “Whenever you touch me my pain is less.” I smiled, made a neutral remark, and was especially glad when she improved enough to go to a rehab unit.
    It was in that time that my last surviving aunt, my father’s sister, Chiara, fell ill. She’d suffered from kidney disease for many years, but at that point in her life she had to be hospitalized. It would turn out that she would die during the six months of my clinicals, and I would be able to see her in Mass General while I was working there and help her a bit. When she started to suffer, like most patients with kidney disease, she had horrible shooting pains in her legs, so every night before I went home