Nurse’s heartbreaking Facebook post shows why equal marriage is so important

As the US celebrates the Supreme Court’s historic ruling legalising same-sex marriage across all 50 states, one nurse has shared the heartbreaking story of what marriage equality means to her.

Trish Gorman, from Pennsylvania, recalled on a public Facebook post her experience of working in a hopital at a time when same-sex partners were denied visitation rights, saying it made her decide she would spend the rest of her life fighting for marriage equality across the US. Read her moving story below:

20 or so years ago, I was a staff nurse in a trauma ICU.
We had a patient come in who had a life-threatening head injury from a car crash.
Most patients that come in in this condition receive a number and a fake name -“unid-1234″ – until we can track down their family.
Well, the first person we tracked down was this guy’s mother, so we called her in.
She was in charge of all the medical decisions we made for this guy.
It was up to her when he had surgery, if we resuscitated him if his heart stopped – all kinds of things.
It was also up to her who we called in case of an emergency and who we allowed to come visit.

Well, turns out, this mother hadn’t seen her son in over twenty years.
She had disowned him because he was gay and because he had fallen in love with a man and decided to live with him.

Anyway, our hands were tied.
We eventually tracked down the guy he’d been living with for the past twenty years.
They had bought a house together.
They had purchased furniture together.

They had built a life together.

Anyway, our hands were tied.
The patient’s ” family” had already established a list
of rules of who could and could not visit.
The man’s life partner was not on the list.

We had to – legally – comply with everything the mother asked of us.

One of her most adamant requests was that the life partner of this man not be allowed to visit.

We had to comply.

We had no legal choice.

I spent weeks leaving work and buying a coffee for the poor man in the lobby who was crying because he couldn’t visit his partner of twenty years.

I couldn’t even legally tell him of his partner’s condition because of HIPPA violations.

My hands were tied.
And my heart was broken.

I was going to spend the rest of my life fighting for marriage equality.

This SCOTUS vote means more to me than any of you will ever know.

Meanwhile, it’s emerged that in protest at the ruling, some county judges in Alabama are refusing to let ANYONE get married – click here to find out more.

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