Saints for Nurses

Ask him: How do I keep caring when the work has taken everything I have?

Before Camillus was the patron saint of nurses, he was a wreck. Born in Italy in 1550, he grew to enormous height, well over six feet, with a soldier’s build and a soldier’s temper, and he threw his early life away on war and on a gambling addiction so total that he lost his money, his weapons, and finally the shirt off his own back in the streets of Naples. On top of it he carried a wound in his leg that never healed, an open, chronic sore he would live with for the rest of his life. By his mid-twenties he was broke, addicted, brawling, and half-crippled, a man with no future anyone could see. When he finally hit bottom and turned his life around, he tried to enter a strict religious order, and the wound in his leg got him turned away, twice, because a sick man could not keep the rule.