The Heavy Weight

I felt the achy pain radiating from my neck down to both of my shoulders, as I secured the black strap resting on my right shoulder with my right hand to prevent the heavy, red emergency bag from slipping.

It was almost 7 o’clock in the morning as I ran toward the outside yard of the prison’s Intake where a neat row of huge buses and its engines were warming up to take hundreds of prisoners to different courts for them to see the judge. The rising sun’s rays were peeking through in one corner of the still lingering darkness of the previous night.

Down on the cold ground was this pale-looking male, dressed up in gold, meaning he has some mental health problem. His hands chained in front of his waist, same with both of his feet, he quivered from the constant blasts of the icy, early morning winds. The stench from the fumes of the diesel engines running surrounded the corners of the yard.

No one witnessed when he fell. But it was obvious that he needed an urgent treatment. I noticed the huge bump he sustained on the right side of his forehead. Fortunately, there were no other major wounds or problems. He tried to answer my queries with a mentality like that of a toddler, but he was making sense.

“Don’t move your neck!” I commanded as I saw him trying to look way past below his feet that needed him to elevate his head. As I requested for blankets from the deputies to shield him from the cold winds, I immediately requested for an ambulance so he could be brought to the hospital.

While monitoring him, the achy pain I had been feeling persisted. But I knew it wasn’t the heavy weight from the emergency bag that had caused it. It was the weight of the responsibilities I faced that night.

Responsibilities that nurses like me, whether at the hospital, prison, nursing homes, birthing places and other places carry on our hands and shoulders as we face situations needing timely interventions and where autonomous judgments have no room for errors. It is in those moments where we play a tug o’war between life and death.

Like Jesus…It wasn’t the heavy wooden cross that He carried upon His shoulders…It was the weight of the sins of the world…So you and I may live…

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” – 2 Corinthians 5:21 [NIV]