Senior Nurse Mentor

Loyalty and Focus

In this chapter, we return to one of my themes—that we can understand more about handling stress in a hospital by looking at how stress is handled in other situations, including mountain climbing and firefighting.

Although I’ve forgotten the specifics, the scene is one of my favorites. Long ago—probably in Africa—a patch of newly exposed clay is rendered soft by a rain that fell in the night and has not yet been baked hard by the mid-day sun. Perhaps it was 100,000 years ago, perhaps more. That mud, baked rock-like, remains to this day. 

In that drying mud we see three sets of footprints of differing sizes. The largest are almost certainly that of a man and the smaller of a woman. Between them are the tiny footprints of a child. Think of a father and mother, with the child walking between them and holding on to a hand of each. The child, who in my retelling is a little girl, senses the danger her parents feel and grips all the more tightly.

In my imagination, I see that long-ago family traveling a bit further and crossing a meadow with grass so high that it reaches to the woman’s shoulders. Suddenly out of the grass perhaps 20 yards in front of them, an adult male lion rears up. It’s hungry and sees them as prey. Their only chance is a tall tree over a hundred yards away through a dense thicket of briers and brambles.

What happens next matters immensely because I believe represents the essence of what it means to be truly human. What those two parents do is what we as humans should do.

We notice the mother first. Without hesitation, she grabs up her daughter and plunges headlong into those briers and brambles, shielding the child as best she can and heedless of the thorns ripping her skin.

We turn our attention to the father. He’s not moved an inch. He stands all the taller, communicating to that lion, “Before you get to my family, you must deal with me.” Perhaps by sheer force of will he can intimidate that lion into moving away—perhaps not. To prepare for the latter, he raises high his stone-tipped club and focuses on the danger he faces. If the lion attacks, he has but one hope. He must bring that club down with every ounce of his strength and with perfect timing and placement. The tip of the stone must come down in the center of the lion’s forehead in a killing blow. No other strike will succeed.

That long-ago scene fades away. The point I wanted to make has been made. It has revealed two of the traits that define our humanity. They are loyalty, which we might also call love, and focus.

The father and mother demonstrate loyalty to one another and to the child they love. The mother knows the father will stand and fight the lion even at the cost of his life. The father knows the mother will do her best to get their child to safety. Even the child, young as she is, knows she can depend on them. That’s why she gripped their hands so tightly.

At this point, we shouldn’t become shrill or ideological. It’s pointless to claim that the father or the mother is braver. The mother risks her life fleeing with her daughter rather than without. The father risks his life by standing up to the lion. The difference does not lie in their bravery, but how they demonstrate love. Each does what he or she can do best. The stronger fights the lion, the other tends the child. That may be why under stress men tend toward a fight-or-flight response, while women lean toward tend-or-befriend. 

The other trait you see is focus. In the presence of so much danger, both the mother and father must focus on what matters and ignore all else. The mother must run with every ounce of her strength and ignore the thorns ripping at her skin. The father must set aside any fear he feels, project more confidence than he possesses, and stand fast when the lion attacks. Flight at that point would be folly. His only hope rests in well-struck blow. On that he must focus his all.