Hob Osterlund’s essay is permeated with many ideas and thoughts revolving around two tragic fates of patients. Inevitably, nurses are witnesses and participants in such tragedies from time to time because it is impossible to treat patients mechanically and detachedly. The complexity of the author’s position is that she is experiencing two entirely different tragedies and situations simultaneously. A woman dying of cancer and clinging to life and a young drug addict who has gone insane should seem to evoke opposite emotions. However, they all intertwine in the same hospital, cling to each other with one similar symptom – baldness, and cause a general feeling of bitterness and sand slipping from under their feet.
The author begins with the physical manifestation of the disease – baldness and room numbers. Such descriptions appear impersonal, often becoming the norm in the medical community. She starts with the eye of a nurse who sees many patients through the lens of their illnesses and the numbers on the hospital ward door (Osterlund, 2016). However, the author expands this view for the reader, giving more detailed medical information and more personal information. This way, the nurse gets to know and connects with her patients. At first, they are just room number and disease, but in the process of long-term care and communication, a nurse cannot help but get to know her patients better and get to know them personally.
This essay conveys a sense of the commonality of human grief. All people can share feelings with others, despite different circumstances. In the face of adversity, tragedy, and death, every person feels the same, no matter how he tries to behave. In the end, a dying patient asks her husband to sit with a deranged young man (Osterlund, 2016). Maybe partly because she wants her husband to care for someone who will outlive her, or perhaps because personal grief makes people more sensitive to someone else’s tragedy.
Reference
Osterlund, H. (2016). Bald Places. In Editor B. Doyle (Ed.), A Sense of Wonder: The World’s Best Writers on the Sacred. Orbis Books.