School had just started for the new school year. It was hot and humid. I had just retired from ICU nursing and behavioral health, a 46-year career and never skipping a beat. After several months of retirement, I couldn’t sit still. I was bored and had that nagging feeling that I wasn’t done yet with my career. Maybe that nagging feeling was guilt. Like you can’t quit. You can’t stop. You have to keep helping people.

I thought a PRN job with the local school system as a school nurse would be easy. No ventilators, no vasopressor IV drips, no code blues and CPR on people who should have died peacefully. But this was a different arena. A different fight. Cell phones and computers and social media didn’t exist for me in high school back in the 1970s. But here I was. In my late 60s, I became a school nurse.

I was dealing with young people straggling into the front school office to our health room. I thought it’d be easy, but I should have known better. Nothing is really easy. Maybe different. My children were all grown, and I so remember their teenage angst. The students would haphazardly stumble in. Some with low GPAs or test time and looking for an excuse to get out of that test. Or the boy that comes in and announces mom is coming to pick me up: “I’m sick.”

She was in 10th grade. She shuffled into our health room. No eye contact. Head hung low. In the land of teenage looks and perfection, her long hair was tangled and unkempt. And that long-sleeve sweatshirt. But it was August. Hot August. I asked her what was wrong. Nausea, dizzy. So I had to take her blood pressure, but she refused to let me roll up her sleeve. I touched her arm, and she whimpered. As I slowly rolled her sleeve up to take her BP, there it was: a chaotic etching of superficial cuts up and down her forearm.

I instinctively knew. I could tell. I quietly told her she was safe, that it’s not her fault. Tears rolled down. “He did it again. Daddy. Again. Molested me. Again. Mom doesn’t know. She can’t know.” And then she started to cry uncontrollably. I hugged her and told her we would protect her. We called in the school counselor. It was our obligation to notify social services. The police covered the campus. Protective services arrived. She was escorted off to the local hospital for examination and eventually placed in foster care.

I hugged her, and she clung to me as if I was her last life vest. Those memories flooded back to me of why I had to eventually leave working in the ER. The domestic abuse and violence, the child abuse of innocent children. Their eyes told stories to me that would haunt me for years.

I only lasted as a school nurse for one month and then retired for good. I’m 70 now, and I can’t go back. I try to heal with therapy. I walk my dogs every day; I rescued them, but they really rescued me. I play with my little grandchildren. I hold on to those meaningful times of saving lives or letting go, working with great nurses and doctors. The camaraderie, the bond we had. The good times and the bad times. But this was it. No longer can I bear the burden of human frailty and the evil that prevails.

Debbie Moore-Black is a nurse who blogs at The Critical Care Nurse.