Finding Love in spite of a Dark Past

As a nurse actively caring for people dealing with life’s major crisis, it’s inevitable not to be exposed to matters of the heart.

For example, a couple of years ago, I’d managed the care of an attractive woman in her 20’s called Rachael (not real name).She had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C some few years back and had come to the hospital to have a major surgery that was related to another condition. Her boyfriend, (let’s call him Sam) came along to be her major support system. Now, Sam wasn’t aware that Rachael had been diagnosed with Hepatitis. According to Rachael, there wasn’t any reason for Sam to know since they hadn’t had sex …yet. From my conversation with her, I understand that she wanted to cross that bridge of telling him about her disease once the issue of them having sex together came into the picture.

One of the instructions that Nursing educators drill into every Student Nurse is the need to keep and protect a patient’s privacy.  The rule is that you never, ever, ever share information about your patient with anybody and that includes spouses, parents, children etcetera, except if the patient gives you that permission to share.  And this not only applies to nurses, but to all professions in the health care industry. In the US, breaking this rule can result in some very dire consequences, including the loss of your professional license, heavy fines that run up to the millions and even jail time. Since I strongly abide by that code of ethics for nurses, I couldn’t help wonder what Sam would do the moment he found out that Rachael had hepatitis. Would he still want her? From the short interaction I’d had with Rachael and Sam, I could tell that Sam doted much on Rachael. He was always so concerned for her and was big on encouraging her to get better after the surgery. In fact, he’d flown in from New York (Not real city) to come stay with her in Texas where she’d had her surgery.

Two years later, I still wonder about Sam and Rachael.  I know that it’s a pretty much steep price to pay – the price to be with someone who has an unpleasant past such as an incurable STD.  In happily-ever-afters like the romance novels that I write, Sam and Rachael would work out just fine. Take for example Tory, my heroine in Love at Dawn has a terrible secret that she’s keeping away from her family and most importantly from Rashad, the man she fell in love with when she was a child.  In the end, Rashad is able to deal with Tory’s dark secret. In real life, I believe (and have actually seen) lovers puting aside all negativity and sticking to each other in spite of ‘whatever’.

I hear someone say, “But for goodness sake, not with a condition like Hepatitis.” But you know what, I still believe it is possible even with hepatitis.  Maybe it’s because I have my head so high up in the butt of optimism. And if this is the case, I’m going to have to say that I actually like Optimism’s butt. It’s a nice place to keep one’s head; a cushion for that belief that even people who are deemed unlovable and un-romancable can and do find love regardless of distasteful histories.