Oncology Nurse Quotes

An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they're the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need to read your child's chart to remember where they've left off from the previous visit. It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants -- the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice, the ones who can teach you how to flush a central venous catheter, or suggest which patient floor might still have Popsicles left to be stolen, or tell you which dry cleaners know how to remove the stains of blood and chemotherapies from clothing. The nurses know the name of your daughter's stuffed walrus and show her how to make tissue paper flowers to twine around her IV stand. The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable.

It's one thing knowing you people cheering you on, yet another to know they have walked in your footsteps.

It's one thing knowing you have people cheering you on, yet another to know they've walked in your footsteps.

Oncology wards, more than maybe anywhere on earth, are musicless places. Instead of flowing melody, there’s incessant beeping. During the day, the halls clamor with a constant medical call-and-response loop: nurses hollering to one another; patients calling, sometimes screaming, for morphine; nurses scrambling to find doctors; visitors searching frantically for nurses. But in some ways, those noises—however annoying—are a welcome distraction, a reminder that the hospital “machine” is in healthy operation. It is the quiet hours after dark, the hollow sounds of silent suffering, that are most frightening.

It must be immeasurably difficult for the nurses and staff in the oncology ward. They tend so ably, often for such long periods, to their beloved patients, only to see them suddenly disappear with a death sentence and, probably more often that not, no final goodbye.

A St. Louis oncology nurse quoted Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl to States News Service in 2012: “ ‘What is to give light must endure burning.’ I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.