Hands Blessed, Face Washed

I remember a woman who was a patient of mine, just a couple of days before Christmas about five years ago. I’m a nurse, and worked then at a health care center in Atlantic City which served people who were homeless or uninsured. 
That particular morning on my way to work I’d heard an absolutely lovely conversation on the radio-part of the Story Corps series on National Public Radio between a retired hospital chaplain and her friend.
The hospital chaplain described to her friend how she used to visit employees throughout the hospital and would bless their hands, thereby bestowing upon them, no matter what their specific work, a sense of the sacred nature of what they were doing. I think this conversation was very much in my mind when, later that afternoon, I met the woman I mentioned as I started writing here. 
She lived with severe alcoholism, and had been staying at the Rescue Mission. Earlier that day, out on the streets, she’d been mugged. Before she came to me, she’d been to the emergency room and then promptly released after no serious injuries had been discovered. Apparently when she’d returned to the Rescue Mission, she’d been sent to us. 
When I entered the examination room where she was sitting waiting for me, the reason she’d been sent to us was immediately apparent. Her face was swollen and bruised, her hair matted with dried blood, her forehead and cheeks and jawline splotched with tiny scabbed gashes. 
She sat hunched over, looking small and frail, pained and vulnerable. After I’d had a chance to assess the situation, I realized that the only thing I could really do for her was to wash her wounds, and so I proceeded to do this. 
As I began, the conversation I’d heard that morning came to me. I felt as though the hospital chaplain from the radio had reached into my very car to bless my own hands, and with her blessing at the center of my being, I slowly cleansed her face. 
She had looked very old to me when I’d first seen her, but in the process of reviewing her chart I’d noted that in fact she was younger than I.  As I continued gently to coax away what I could of the remnants of her injuries, for some reason I thought of my own three sisters, all younger than I. 
It dawned on me that her age was like theirs in relation to me, and I tried then to wash her face as if I were washing the face of one of my own sisters. We did not speak, but to this day I remember the sound of the room’s hush, which reverberated with the grace of our time together.
When I had finished, she whispered “Thank you” and left.
If Christmas comes to us as it did that first Christmas, then it comes in the form of vulnerability.  Christmas came to me that year in the form of this patient, whose wounded beautiful humanity reminded me of what Christmas is really all about.     
Parral writes from Tuckahoe.