HONESTY
As Jason came through the door to RAC, a young black man lying lifelessly on a stretcher of pale green linen, the surgeon came towards me telling me not to tell Jason that his biopsy was positive.
I felt inner terror. A man, less than 18 years old, was going to come close to the "truth" of living today. Yet the terror inside me was really fueled by the becoming moral issue I was going to face soon.
Jason was surely going to ask of the results upon waking from anesthesia. "They always do." Going to sleep unknowing demands waking-to-know. "Honesty."
Honesty as a lived precept of caring requires that I, nurse, must always and ever regard the person nursed from a position of love. I must enter all nursing activity with the sole purpose of using truth, only and ever, to promote the spiritual growth of the person nursed. In this climate of openness to myself and to the other, we can begin to experience freedom from fear.
Jason inevitably opened his eyes only seconds or minutes later—I was so concerned with the surgeon's directive that I lost perception of time. My choice? The surgeon's choice? Jason's choice?
All too soon, before I could decide "how" to act, Jason had arrived at our moment of honesty versus dishonesty.
There were tears in Jason's eyes and as quickly as the endotrachial tube was removed, words came from Jason's essence. "Why me, God?"
I was pre-empted. (That's what happens when I write the script of nursing.)
Instead of dancing around "telling" Jason, I was now only able to "be-with" Jason. To suffer with Jason, to come to compassionate knowing of Jason's subjective reality. "I heard him," Jason choked and sobbed.