MAE JULIAN
The Heart Implant Journal
30Nov84
I’m just consumed with rage. I’m trying to get all these feelings under control, and evaluate them so that nothing shows on the exterior of my being when I go into work tonight. I got a call from my brother, Jim, this morning, and he reports that a nurse has been written up in The News Sentinel in Fort Wayne. It was about a “local native” on the famous artificial heart team. I became undone. I asked him whom it was about, seeing as how we have been threatened with our very lives that no press releases are to be done. Jim told me the article and picture was about Cindy. I’m just furious. I had to go out and drive around for awhile. She has been a problem in many ways because of her continuing estrangement from the members of the team. And now this outright betrayal. She has made every attempt since the beginning of the TAH (total artificial heart) project to undermine other nurses, but I have overlooked it and made excuses for her. But this is the final straw! She is from Fort Wayne, also, by coincidence. I have been totally silent, and not even given my own family details that are considered confidential at this time. And now she comes out in the press in my own hometown with a big article about her, with her picture.
There was a front-page story about her in The News Sentinel last night. When Jim told me he read the headline he expected it to be about me. I just went nuts! It sounds like professional jealousy, I know. I hear myself and read my words and realize how terrible I sound. Anything I say would make me look like a fool. I would never have done such a thing to her, knowing she was from Fort Wayne. I would never have envied her anything or begrudged her anything…once…but my feelings after everything else, is that she took my achievement in my own hometown out from under me. How selfish I sound. Yet, I can’t let go of the rage. She did it so surreptitiously. Never mentioned a word. Now she competes with me. I just can hardly believe her behavior. We were a team once. It’s just that I was always the extrovert, the laughing one, and she was the quiet understated one. It always bothered her that she felt she lived in my shadow. She hated that she was seen as meek and mousy when, in fact, she was, and is, a top-notch intelligent nurse. I wonder if she felt she had to split the friendship with me in order to be perceived as being able to stand on her own. We spoke of this many times before, and I always knew it bothered her. I did, really, everything I could to erase that image because she really was and is a good critical care nurse in her own right. And it really wasn’t fair that she should have ever been seen as less. But I’m afraid my efforts to tell people that she was just a super good nurse and equal only made it worse. She said she always felt like the sidekick. Once she told me that I was the Lone Ranger and she was Tonto.
As the TAH project came in she knew that she was stronger in mechanics than I was, to which I readily admit. I felt she saw her chance to surge ahead and she did a combination of things: she became more assertive and she also began to undermine me, and many of the other nurses. The other nurses made note of it to me, but I always defended her. I thought it would pass, and I never thought she would do anything unkind to me. She wanted to be singular and #1. I guess she sees this as her chance to shine—to stand in the limelight. What do I know? I’m no headshrink. The pain of going through these awakenings and insight about her is extremely difficult, but I have been through pain in the past, and I will deal with this too. I will handle all this, and do it well. I guess I just lost all that composure when Jim called and said, “Well, I guess this must be a nurse who actually works with the patient directly.” I almost shouted, “What the _ _ _ _ do you think I do?” Rage took hold of my insides and I see she just beat me in my own hometown. I can see her smugly smiling to herself saying—wait until Mae hears this! Her efforts to directly hurt and diminish me are so painful. I must appear to gracefully take this blow from her. And I have to get my head straight before I go in to work today. What happened to us? What happened to the unity, the comradeship we had? Does my friendship mean so little to her? I just hope the sacrifice is worth it to her when all is said and done. I have been a good supportive friend to her for five years. I wonder now, was it ever real? It seems that I understand relationships so well, and then, there are times when I think that I don’t understand anything at all.
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