My friend is a nurse. A darn good one at that. I haven’t seen her for years now, but social media assists in collasping that distance.
But no, I do not think that we are of any affinity other than the occassional notifications on our facebook.com’s newsfeed. It’s almost delirious how our relationships with our ‘friends’ quickly dissolve to ‘somebody that you used to know’. But this is not what I wish to write.
I have the utmost respect for nurses, and by that extension, anyone in the medical field. Even my best friend who dreams of being a social worker since I met her.
I just never had that capacity to care for such a large radius of the community. Not proud of it, but my comfort would be I am a fierce fighter when it comes to my family. But that’s guarded by an emotion, and a psychological and physical label we were given birth into.
I never could extend my hand for a random person as much as some people can without even a thought of “what’s in for me?”
So yes, I do want to narrate the stories of the voiceless in the war-stricken faces of this planet. But that’s just it – stories. Stories that would be subjected to much of what I will be made to do essays for my Ethics in Journalism exam tomorrow: objectivity, fairness, public interest, conflict of interest, commercial bias, accuracy, invasion of privacy, protection of sources, distaste in content, offending material, and the truth.
These stories would be lost within the words of someone in another continent, behind his morning papers, sipping his morning coffee, having his morning toast, before squeezing into the morning traffic. The life of an article is temporary, and dead by the end of the same morning.
Unlike the immortalised rememberance a medical practitioner would gift to a patient. Their souls would be thanked long after the outpatient has seen the last of the sterilised-everythings.
My professional route has a pathetically useless moral compass that points to what is newsworthy instead of what is worthy of news. This is a discrimination of the editorial limitations; a story only has so many columns, and/or time on air.
Unlike the help that doctors and nurses have taken a humanitarian oath for.
So yes, my friend is a nurse – the unseen awesome hands behind much of what is ever only credited as a doctor’s job. But it’s just that. Who cares if there is no acknowledgement anyway? Saving one life has bragging rights that no medic has ever used.
I can’t say much for journalists. Personally, the exhilaration of seeing my own by-line, as short lived as it is, never fades. The entire industry is based on unbridled narcissism, and I am the same.
To help people directly, I wonder if an article has made such an impact as a hug ever could.
I wish my profession had such a fulfilling purpose.
I have a friend who is a nurse, and she said that beautiful quote even as she checked into a hospice on facebook.com. Now that, that is dedication.
