by KELLI FONTENOT
Published in the July 2008 edition of Women In Business, a publication of The Dalles Chronicle
Taking Heart
Nina van Es, Celilo nurse practitioner
On weekends, Nina van Es retires to her house and 40 acres outside Lyle, Wash. A recording of soft Hawaiian guitar fills her living room as she binds a new memory to a page in her journal. She concentrates hard, layering pieces of tissue paper in her notebook, sometimes adding magazine clippings and pressed flowers from her yard. The fragile shapes and vibrant hues in Nina's collages reflect events she can't describe with words.
These tranquil moments help take the focus off the difficult experiences she sometimes deals with as the nurse practitioner of the Celilo Cancer Care Center.
"I do it if I want quiet time," Nina says. "I do it as something to keep my hands busy when I am processing stuff. Sometimes days here are hard."
The path of a cancer patient is a difficult one, but often, so is the path of the caregiver. When a patient has incurable cancer, doctors can only try to manage symptoms and make the patient as comfortable as possible.
"People pass on after you've treated them for years, or you've gone to funerals, and you have to have something that you can do to help yourself through that, because caregivers grieve. If you know somebody close for seven or eight years, you grieve when they're gone."
Still, Nina insists cancer is not a death sentence.
She argues instead that life is a death sentence.
