Patient Zero

As you may or may not know by now, I am a nurse.  It wasn't a life long ambition or a secret dream.  In fact, it kind of came at me out of the blue.


After doing time at McDonald's I had landed a job with Council Laboratory where I was able to fulfill the dream of being a Lab Assistant.  I loved the hell out that job, but unfortunately it was only a one year contract with no promises of renewal. So, when my contract had done its time and no position had become available, I applied for a job as a Lab Assistant with a pathology company.

It was a job any old monkey could do and with the bullying from a coworker I pretty much hated everything to do with it.  So boy and I quit our jobs and tried to make it in Tasmania.  While it was pretty there, jobs were few and far between.. Three months of me staying at home playing video games came and went so we decided to pack it all back up and move back to Queensland.

I managed to get a job doing the exact thing I hated except it was now in Brisbane.  The people were much nicer and, although I was much happier in this new position, I could still feel I was missing something.

All day every day I scanned barcodes, typed codes and processed samples.  The tedium was almost too much to bare.  The job was so monotonous that the only thing that kept me going was thinking about the people whose blood I was processing.  The lab was a part of a hospital with a large oncology ward so we quickly became familiar with the regulars details.  I never saw any patients, just names, dates of birth, addresses and tests.

Sometimes my colleagues and I would imagine actually meeting the patients.  We would talk about them as if we knew them closely, even though we had never even laid eyes on them.  People with interesting names of dates of birth were the favourite.  'Hello John Smith, sixth of the sixth sixty-six' we would say as we processed the specimens.  I can still remember a few of them.

But there was one.  I don't know why, but I always remembered him.  I often wondered how he was going and how his day was.  I would wonder if I had ever met him in the hall and smiled hello only to never know it was him. This went on for weeks - months.

Then one day I came into work.  There was paperwork sitting on the sorting bench.  As I picked it up I realised they were blood test results.  All over the page there were numbers highlighted in bold.  It was his test results.  I was no expert, but I knew enough to know what had happened.  There was no way he made it another day after that night.

After work I went home and cried for the man I had never met and now would never meet.  Not because I thought I could have saved him or anything like that.  Not because I thought I was better than any of the nurses caring for him already... but because... I don't even know.  Because I could have given him a smile or a kind word.  Perhaps I could have done something meaningful instead of punching numbers.

I know now that day was the day I decided to be a nurse.  On a day like today, where a patient thanks me so much for just calling their loved one to say they are out of theatre... or smiles at me because I smiled at them, I think of Patient Zero.  A man who died so I could finally understand I needed to be a nurse.