Answering the Call

By Amanda Skenandore

For me, nursing wasn’t a calling. It wasn’t a lifelong dream, a family tradition, or an intrinsic part of my identity. It was a job. A means to make a living. Sure, I wanted to help people. Wanted to feel like I’d done something meaningful at the end of the day. But I also wanted a flexible schedule and a decent wage.

Maybe that’s why the whole Florence Nightingale image didn’t resonate with me. Saintly Angel of Mercy. Lady with the Lamp. I was a skilled professional not an angel, and those rosy images didn’t match my modern-day reality. Doctors were demeaning. Veteran nurses were hardened, impatient, and indifferent. I spent more time filling out forms and battling faulty equipment than I did at the patient’s bedside.

Yet there were rewarding moments too. Watching patients who had been sick for months get better and go home. Helping nervous families learn to care for their loved ones. Seeing the pride and gratitude in their eyes when they succeeded. Catching a subtle change in a patient’s condition before it was too late. Knowing, at the end of the day, I had made a difference.

After just three years on the job, I quit nursing to pursue my true calling: writing. I’d loved the art of storytelling since childhood. But when I got to college I’d tucked away my dream of becoming an author in favor of a practical career. If nursing taught me anything though, it was that life was too short to hate what you do.

I was lucky. I had the support and means to make such a foolhardy leap. And leap I did. I wrote a novel. I studied the publishing industry. I joined a critique group. Six years later, I signed with an agent. Two more years, and my first novel debuted. (Not the first novel I’d written, mind you, but the first good enough to sell.)

Hard work got me there. Persistence. Chance. And a “day job” I could depend on to pay the bills: nursing. You see, I’d lasted just over a year before going back. Nursing might not be my calling, but it gave me the time and flexibility to do what was.

A great thing about nursing is the ability to reinvent yourself. I switched tracks and became an infection prevention nurse—a specialty I truly enjoyed. What could be more interesting than fighting germs and preventing infections? They’re everywhere, germs. On tabletops and swing sets. On our skin and inside our guts. And, yes, even in hospitals. Especially in hospitals. My job was to ensure those germs didn’t get where they shouldn’t be—inside a patient’s blood or on a clean piece of surgical equipment.

For several years I happily divided my time between the hospital and home office. I got my infection control certification. I wrote and published a second book.

But 2020 was rocky from the start. My third book needed a complete rewrite, and I had to ask my publisher for a contract extension. My confidence, already battered from weak sales reports, was sinking fast. To meet my new deadline, I planned to decrease my hours at the hospital. Sure, news of a novel virus in Wuhan, China piqued my interest. Professional curiosity, that was all. Then the virus appeared in Thailand and Japan. Europe and New York. Suddenly patients with coronavirus symptoms arrived at my own hospital. Curiosity turned to alarm.

At first, the scope of the outbreak seemed limited. Probably because we were undercounting. In Vegas, testing required an in-depth conversation with the health district. I’d call and describe a patient’s symptoms, travel history, X-ray reports, and lab values. Then the health district would decide if they could spare one of the limited test kits they’d been allotted. More often than not, the answer was no.

Instead of decreasing, my hours at the hospital eked upward. Twenty-five. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. By mid-March I’d abandoned my novel. When I wasn’t at the hospital, I was reading reports of the virus’s rapid spread. Watching the news where images of overcrowded hospitals and ventilated patients flashed across the screen. Dreaming I too had become infected.

Three things I remember from those early days. One: the fear. My colleague and I, with the help of so many others, did our best to keep hospital staff safe. But how safe can you feel when you’ve been wearing the same mask for three days straight? When you’re immunocompromised or pregnant? When the WHO and CDC’s guidance changes day to day?

Two: the quiet. Hospitals are usually bustling with visitors, volunteers, and vendors. Not to mention all the staff and patients. But during those initial weeks of lockdown, it was only us. Nurses. Doctors. Therapists. Technicians. And those people are sick enough to need our care. The lobby was silent. The elevators stalled and empty. Only the squeak of rubber-soled shoes sounded in the hallways. We were holding our breath, waiting.

Three: the scramble. Uncertainty abounded. How does the virus spread? How long does it live on surfaces? What medicines work to treat it? What products work to clean and disinfect it? The staff looked for guidance, and my colleague and I scrambled to provide it. Thankfully we weren’t alone. The worldwide community of public health workers and infectious disease specialists were asking the same questions and sharing their successes.

The Las Vegas community rallied and supported us too. People donated so much food to the hospital we could scarcely eat it all. Words of encouragement cropped up in chalk lettering on the sidewalks outside. Kids wrote letters thanking us for our service. It was a huge boost to morale. Even that billboard along the I-15 picturing a line of healthcare workers and the words Not All Superheroes Wear Capes made it easier to return to work day after day. Easier to face the stress. The uncertainty. The slowly mounting deaths.

We braced for the worst. For the wave that struck Lombardy and New York to crash down upon us too. But, thankfully, it didn’t. Las Vegas crawled out of its shell. Lights flickered on. Hotels opened up. Parks and stores and restaurants came alive again.

At the hospital, elective surgeries resumed. Visitors returned. With COVID-19 cases dropping and my writing deadline looming, I cut back my hours to finish my manuscript. It was a novel about leprosy. About forced quarantine and the ruinous stigma that accompanied the disease. About the doctors and nurses who labored for years to find a cure. And though the story was set a century in the past, it helped me find perspective and make sense of today.

But getting back into the swing of writing was more difficult than I expected. For the first six weeks of the pandemic—had it only been six weeks?—I woke up every morning with the utmost clarity of purpose. There was no better place I could be than at the hospital. I believed in the power of art to effect positive change. (I still do.) But to see that change, the artist must weather the doubt and sometimes sheer drudgery of creation. The words I now typed, the sentences I edited wouldn’t reach anyone for months.

The night before my deadline, I dashed off an email to my editor with the finished manuscript attached. I knew it still needed work and resolved to keep editing it even as I began outlining my next novel. These tasks, concrete and cerebral, I could do. But when it came to actual writing, I was paralyzed. My creativity sapped. I wasted time doing what most people had gotten their fill of weeks earlier: cleaning, baking, doom scrolling. I looked forward to my shifts at the hospital in a way I never had before. At least there I knew I was doing something worthwhile. As the world opened up, I was closing down. Had I fooled myself into thinking that writing was my calling? That I had a true calling at all?

And then an unsuspected thing happened. My editor loved the manuscript I sent him. So did the publicist and the sales team. Suddenly the rush was on to get the book edited and advance reader copies out to booksellers. I had found hope and perspective writing about the lives of people suffering from leprosy. Might pandemic-weary readers find that as well?

I won’t know until the book comes out next year. For now, when I’m not at the hospital battling this latest wave of COVID-19, I’m back to facing the blank page. I’ve decided to write my next novel about America’s first nursing school. I want to better understand the origins of the profession. Yes, that means Florence Nightingale and her lamp. But the history encompasses so much more. Just like today’s profession. Nurses aren’t born of one mold. We don’t all hear a calling. At least not every day. But, like the art of writing, the job enriches our lives and allows us to enrich the lives of others.

Amanda Skenandore is the author of two historical novels, The Undertaker’s Assistant and Between Earth & Sky, winner of the 2019 American Library Association’s Reading List Award for Best Historical Fiction. She’s a Nevada Arts Council grant recipient and Roster Artist. Her third novel, The Second Life of Mirielle West, comes out in August 2021. She lives in Las Vegas with her husband and their pet turtle Lenore.

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Kathleen KuoDecember 14, 2020DComment