Kassandra August-Marcucio ’12

These Hands

It was all a mess.  I didn’t know what had happened.  Somewhere between promising forever and now, it had all fell apart.  As I drove in my car to work, I cried for the thousandth time.  I was six months pregnant and my husband had decided that he didn’t want to be married any more.  Each time I packed my bags and found the courage to leave, at the door I would find some reason to stay; some excuse, some doubt, some hope that things would be exactly as I planned.  And then, I would find myself crying in my car with my brain telling my heart the truth.

My heartache was so raw and so deep I had thought several times about quitting my job as a nurse.  Night after night, working in the intensive care unit I thought my heart would burst.  How can people trust me to take care of their loved ones? I couldn’t even keep my family together; and here I was in the business of trust.  People would leave their loved ones with me, their nurse, and expect that I would keep everything together, that when they came back in the morning or the next day, that everything would be as it should.  My hands were the ones they expected to heal their families, when my family was broken and falling apart.

I walked on the floor taking a deep breath and putting on the usual mask.  “Are you ok?” people would ask. “Yes, yes, I’m fine…just the hormones” I would answer with a weak smile.  Their concern would be there in their eyes but it would fade because they wanted to go home to their families and they would begin giving me report.

Tonight was a special night.  I was caring for a patient who was a live organ donor.  His story was sad, as with most patients who end up being live organ donors.  The patient was a prescription drug abuser who had an alcohol addiction, but a family who loved him and protected him.  If he were high, they would care for him so he was safe; if he went to get drunk, they would search the bars until they found him and brought him home.  Between his wife and his daughters, they had managed to orchestrate their love for him despite his addictions.  Ironically, he fell asleep in his lounge chair while watching a movie with his daughter and he silently cardiac arrested.  By the time the daughter realized he was really unconscious, he already had irreversible anoxic brain injury.  He was my only patient that night.

The first time I walked into the room I was amazed.  His wife sat faithfully at his bedside and their youngest daughter, the one who had been present at his arrest, sat on the other with a pile of paper in her lap, intently focused on folding origami birds.  There were already hundreds of little origami birds present in the room on the bed and the tables.  They were beautiful.  I introduced myself to the wife and the daughter and then carefully picked up one of the birds.  I gently questioned the daughter.  She looked up with pain and loss clearly present in her eyes and told me that there is a Japanese legend that states that the person who folds a thousand origami birds may be granted one wish.  I didn’t need her to elaborate as to what that wish was.  As I looked at her father lying still in the bed, I knew what she would wish for.  The ventilator pumped breaths rhythmically and the I.V. pumps sang their repetitive song, and right then and there I realized that all of us in that room had the same wish: that our families had been perfect and exactly how we had wanted them to be.

I worked more passionately then I had in months.  The baby in my belly rolled and kicked throughout the whole night.  I felt as if I were alive and awake for the first time in a long time.  I loved his family and spent the entire night in their room.  They recalled the good times and the bad times.  We laughed and we cried together that night in the intensive care unit.  They shared with me and I shared a small portion of my pain with them.  “Sometimes no matter how hard you try, things will never be the way you want. But there comes a time when you have to make a wish and let go…” his wife said to me.  I watched as she glanced over at her daughter and then stroked her husband’s hand.

In the morning, I brought the patient and his family to the OR for the organ recovery.  I watched his family say a tearful goodbye to him as he went into the operating room with a thousand origami birds covering him.  As I turned to leave the wife touched my shoulder.  She hugged me and thanked me. And then in my hand she placed one of the tiny origami birds, she patted my belly and walked away.

That morning when I drove home I stared at my hands at a stoplight.  These hands were not devoid of healing and love.  I had cared and loved a patient and their family through one of the toughest times of their lives.  These hands would carry me through, and there were thousands of patients who needed my healing touch, and most importantly, one tiny baby. I had learned so much from this family.  As I looked over at the origami bird on the passenger seat I smiled, for me, it was time to make a wish.

Kassandra August-Marcucio, RN, APRN started her nursing career at Quinnipiac University where she received her bachelor’s degree in 2007.  During her time there, she fell in love with acute care nursing and with the encouragement of her boss and nursing professors, decided to apply to Yale University’s Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program.  She graduated from Yale University in May of 2012.  While attending Yale, Kassandra faced some of the toughest challenges in her life; she became a single mother, struggled to balance work and school and even came close to giving up on her nursing career.  But through the tough times and tears, she was reminded time and time again when caring for her patient’s that there was hope.  Kassandra is now happily employed as a Urology Nurse Practitioner at the West Haven CT Veteran’s Affairs Hospital.  She has also given love a second chance and got remarried last July.  Her, her husband, and her son are anxiously awaiting the birth of their baby girl in October.  Kassandra is looking forward to a long life full of happiness, healing and nursing.

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