The bodies of charred Boston marathon bombing victims, screaming out of pain and fear, still haunt the nurses who treated and cared for them at various Boston hospitals. While everyone around them was panicking in a torrid scene, the modern Florence Nightingales had to remain calm, poised and professional.

They did their jobs as they were trained to do, tending to their patients and comforting them in a way that told them everything would be okay, even if it wouldn't.

Now that the debris has been cleared from the streets, and the air no longer looks and smells like smoke, the nurses are starting to let their emotions set in, and are coming forward with what they endured.

From an interview with The Associated Press, nurses from Massachusetts General Hospital, which treated 22 of the 187 victims the first day, openly recounted their experiences.

One ICU nurse, Jean Acquadra, said, "The strength is seeing their faces, their smiles, knowing they're getting better. They may have lost a limb, but they're ready to go on with their lives. They want to live. I don't know how they have the strength, but that's my reward: Knowing they're getting better."

But what about the emergency trauma nurses who were assigned to the source of this brutality? Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston marathon bombers, was taken Beth Israel Deaconess. On-call nurses unwinding at home suddenly shuddered as their smartphones sprang to life with a call to come in and care for the young boy who caused grief to trickle through the quaint, cobbled streets of Boston and all its residents.

While the celebration of Tsarnaev's capture, at about 8:45 p.m. on April 19, was breaking out, so was the struggle of the nurses tending to the terrorist.

All of the nurses asked by supervisors to care for Tsarnaev agreed, putting their professional morals ahead of their personal ones. They had to remind themselves that by helping the 19-year-old's condition improve, justice would be served.

During their shifts, the nurses monitored Tsarnaev's breathing, heart rate, and neurological status every one to two hours. They checked his wounds for signs of infection, asked about his pain, and administered medications.

Still, the compassionate caregivers had trouble separating the view of a battered young boy from the knowledge of what he had done, and had to catch themselves whenever the vulnerability of the "kid" in the hospital bed set in.

While moving Tsarnaev one day, one nurse said, I am really sorry "hon,'' according to an article in The Boston Globe. Typically, the comforting term helps assuage the fear of the patient, but in this case, with an alleged terrorist, it seemed unnatural. Tsarnaev is now at the Federal Medical Center Devens at Fort Devens, a former Army post.

The nurses are now free from public scrutiny, yet bound by their own. If you are compassionate by nature, and find a job that allows you to display this trait on a daily basis, what do you do when that innate sense of being is countered by another part of you, a moral part? Everyone has different sides to them, each of which is displayed every day to different people in unique ways. All there is to do is choose. Who do you want to be in this moment, right now, and what are you going to do?