Saying Goodbye to Scrubs (and Finally, the Lab Coat)

Three years ago, I said goodbye to scrubs. This year, in accord with God’s timing, I took the final  step—and bode  farewell to the  lab coat. It had been a nearly 13-year-journey, approximately 24,000 hours of my life in the US, spent at the bedside, attending to   throbbing, beating, living, breathing, ailing, fighting, dying  humanity. After a decade and a half, the Lord has relieved me of that assignment and has given me a new one, trading my lab coat for regular clothes, the hospital bed for an office desk, the stethoscope for the keyboard and mouse.  I have seen horrors involving blood, vomit, maggots, feces; I have smelled  the stench of disease and death; I have  listened to the heart-wrenching sounds of pain and grief; I have  watched the faces of  suffering, and, as well, I have celebrated the miracles of life, healing, and love and basked in the everyday  goodness and kindness of folks, having spent the better part of my years   with this brave and dedicated army of people in scrubs and lab coats who fight our battles  behind the  facades of these buildings that house our sick.  I have a deep respect and admiration for those of us that continue to don the scrubs and the lab coat.A salute to you, comrades –in -arms!

In my germ phobic, skewed mind, it was thirteen years of deployment in the battleground…where the hospital is a red zone and every surface can contaminate me  with  drug resistant pathogens that infest every ooze and secretion. I remember coming to my first job in the US as a RN looking young and fresh, and after a few months, to have aged many years. The night shifts, the daily mental battles, the long hours, prolonged standing, delaying meals and bathroom breaks,  have left marks on my face, and my body…the back and knee pains, the  spider and varicose veins, the dry, gnarly-veined hands … and invisible ones, too, that are forever imprinted in my mind. I am a battle-scarred veteran of that long deployment.  I don’t know how I could have survived that assignment if not for a Commander  that fought the trenches with me and carried me through. 

I still have to process this new reality, this novel assignment---I feel like someone who has retired!  I am simply incredulous ! I am jubilant, even in the face of my growing neck pains and advancing visual deficiency from sitting and staring at the computer all day.  My germ phobic self have gladly made the trade. I have said goodbye to scrubs. I am saying goodbye to the lab coat.