perspectives via the cancer ward

With regard to shifting frames (and limits to the field of vision)...
last night I spent time with a cancer patient, a woman who could care less about politics. Her worldview consisted of making it from point a to point b without vomiting and without unbearable pain. I say I spent time because to me, saying "took care of" or "cared for" feels more and less adequate. I care for her but in a limited way, a way that allows me to look, to be present, to hold her hand as she walks, to reassure but also to keep from crying when she cries and to keep from vomiting when she does. Still, I care beyond that, as I worry for her wellbeing and am a bit lost in the jargon of "failed reductions and failed chemotherapies" and there is an everpresent sense of gratitude that I am not there, I am not her, sitting in a cold room, sad but hopeful, hurting though laughing, tired, tired, tired but always able to smile and ask how someone else's day is going. We (as the job requires) maintain this illusion of distance, this mental/emotional retrenching that allows us to go home and not cry at every red light at the seeming unfairness of illness, the seemming arbitrariness of distance, of proximity...and of the importance of courtesy, of contact, of kindness.