WRITERLY (ADVERB): CHARACTERISTIC OR TYPICAL OF AN AUTHOR, ESPECIALLY A PROFESSIONAL ONE; MARKED LITERARY.
Day #3 at the COVID clinic. Reality is kicking in. The bridge of my nose is red and inflamed from wearing the N95 mask, and now I have it: “macme.” Acne caused by wearing the mask for so many hours and sweating under it. I was sweating so badly underneath the bodysuit, masks, face shield, and gloves that it ran into my eyes and was dripping off my face.
Luckily, the nurses I work with are awesome and we help each other, no matter what.
Leave a CommentWear a mask. During the pandemic, all of us have heard this request. The direction seems simple enough, and yet, every day I see people walking around in public with their faces fully visible. They seem not to have a care in the world as they stroll along potentially infecting their fellow humans.
I had an unpleasant conversation last week with a woman in the grocery store. She waltzed right in carrying a young girl on her hip. Neither of them were wearing masks. I was in the checkout line and when she passed I said, “You need to put on a mask.” She ignored me and continued to walk through the store. She came by a second time (headed towards the wrong exit) and I repeated my statement.
She replied, “Mind your own business.”
I said, “This is my business.”
She shouted, “I’m not your fucking business!”
Classy.
Feminist and writer Carol Hanisch wrote an essay titled, “The Personal is Political.” By the time of its publication, the phrase was already commonly used among feminists of the 1960s and ’70s as a way to explain that both personal choices and political policies had an effect on women’s lives in the United States.
However, that feminist rally cry doesn’t apply here.
In the case of this worldwide pandemic, there is nothing political about wearing a mask. The issue is one of safety. Infectious disease doctors like Anthony Fauci tell us that people can be asymptomatic and still spread the virus. This is especially concerning when one considers how many in our community are vulnerable. Children younger than a year, the elderly with chronic health conditions, and those who are immunocompromised are all more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population. Unfortunately, we are seeing that this virus, just like the ones before it, does not discriminate. Even if you are not in a high-risk group, you can still die.
I have a couple of medical conditions that make this particular virus dangerous for me. I’ve never been in this position before because I’m in good health, but the reality is that if I contract COVID-19 there is a high likelihood I will die. My life literally depends on everyone following the protocols for wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.
Wear a damn mask.
Leave a CommentI only want to be near you, so I lie on your king-sized heated waterbed. You wear one of dad’s white, v-neck undershirts. I smell Tide laundry detergent and Aqua Net hair spray, but never cigarettes. How? You smoke Virginia Slims all day and after returning from your night shift at the nursing home. Cigarettes, coffee with cream, and conversation are all you need in the morning before bed. I am your captive audience. Dust motes dip and dive in the sunny slant of space between us. I don’t understand the medical jargon you use to describe your patients. It doesn’t matter.
The bed is a cocoon, a wayward point where we connect. I snuggle up against your warm, tall body. You begin to read aloud, and I watch your long, slender fingers turn the pages of a thick blue book embossed with gold lettering. The poetry isn’t highbrow, but I don’t know the difference. You read “Casey at the Bat” by Luther Patrick and “Sleeping at the Foot of the Bed” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer.
Did you ever sleep at the foot of the bed
When the weather was a-whizzin’ cold
When the wind was whistlin’ around the house
And the moon was “yeller” as gold
You give your good warm mattress up
To Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Fred
Too many kinfolks on a bad night
So you went to the foot of the bed.
I have heard these poems dozens of times and still believe the ending will be different. Maybe this time, Casey won’t strike out, and there will be joy in Mudville. Perhaps you won’t die, and I can hold on to you. These stories hold us together. In our daily lives, we orbit one another like satellites on separate paths.
You are the woman who, when I am in elementary school and I cannot find my favorite dress, chases me around our dining room table. Getting caught means you will spank me, and your fury rises as I evade you. You become so enraged you take off one of your white Keds sneakers and throw it at me. It strikes me in the forehead, and I cry from pain but also from the shock of the sudden, cruel blow. I stop running.
At twenty-three, I am raped. Your silence is a hammer blow. I am to blame, you say with your stony facade. I am always to blame. “Go to your support group. Talk to your therapist.” You say this over and over. You are an experienced nurse, but you don’t know how to help me. Perhaps you don’t want to.
You cook delicious meals and wonderful desserts. Chicken with fluffy dumplings, moist meatloaf and creamy mashed potatoes, grilled pork chops with applesauce, biscuits with thick sausage gravy, crisp-edged, fried baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise on Wonder bread, homemade pineapple upside-down cake with sweet yellow rings of fruit and brown sugar, gooey chocolate chip and walnut cookies, cherry cobbler topped with strips of buttery pie crust, and pecan pie made with dark Karo syrup. Maybe this food is your love, and I can’t get enough. I will never get enough.
Three days before Christmas, you have a heart attack at home. You are wearing another of Dad’s t-shirts. Your bright yellow vomit covers the front, and the paramedics cut it up the middle as they try to restart your damaged and diseased heart. They will fail.
In my dreams of you now, we are back in that bed. You are wearing a clean white t-shirt, and my grown body wraps around you. The bed becomes a magic carpet, and we float up, weightless. “Please don’t go,” I say, but it is already too late. You dissolve before my eyes. You become fog and evaporate, and chill my empty arms.
Leave a CommentMarch 12, 2012
Why do you want to be a nurse?
What drives you to get up at 5 a.m., study to the point of falling asleep on top of your medical/surgical book, and clean up yet another patient’s messy bowel movement?
What makes it so important to pass Pharmacology with 80%, to be the first in your clinical group to perform a procedure, to write the care plan to shame all previous care plans?
Tell me: why do you want to be a nurse?
Leave a CommentHello and welcome to my blog. My intention is to write about and discuss the duality in my life and how I reconcile it. I am an artist (writer, singer, dabbler in poetry), and a nurse (blood and guts always included). For years I’ve worked in healthcare while pursuing my creative calling. At times I’ve been happy, but often I’ve been enraged. I perceive it some kind of special injustice that I cannot earn a living as a full-time artist, and I will tell anyone who’ll listen that it’s wrong–it’s just wrong! (add stomping of foot here).
I know that I am not the first artist to feel this way and I will certainly not be the last. The need for a “day job” is the bane and savior of many a talented and aspiring creative. The trick is remembering who you really are. As I sit in yet another work meeting surrounded by people who look like they’ve worked in an office from the time they were born, it is easy to forget. These people are not like me. There is an air of the settled and resigned about them. They know their place in the world and are loath to try to change it.
But that’s not who I want to be.
Besides singing, change is the one constant in my life. I wouldn’t know who I was if I wasn’t continually responding to a shift in my reality. Most of the time I can roll with the punches. But every now and again, life clocks me in the beak and I crumple to the floor like a prizefighter down for the count. It is in these moments that I learn what I’m really made of.
And this is the stuff I want to write about.
As a kid, my house was surrounded on three sides by what seemed to me ever-blooming lilac bushes. The scent coming from those lilac bushes was positively intoxicating. Even in winter, I was convinced that I could smell some distant, lingering trace of the lilacs sleeping under the snow. In the summer, I would be high from the smell of lilacs. I’d lie under the crabapple tree in our front yard, shaded and drowsy, and just breathe it all in. I was a voracious reader then, and still am. I would read and dream, dream and read. The lilacs’ scent was the fragrant anesthesia that carried me off to the fantasyland of my childhood.
Those lilacs seemed to require very little maintenance. Some occasional watering and lots of sunshine were all it took to propel them towards the sky and release the scent I adore. My parents never pruned them or gave them fertilizer. They never talked to the bushes while stroking their buds. Nah. Those plants wanted to thrive and they did.
After all of the time I’ve spent trying to get my own lilacs to grow, I’ve learned something. If a plant does not want to thrive, it will not. The will is everything. I can work every form of magic that I know, but they will still go on and die. They have their own set of priorities that have nothing to do with me. The more I push, the more they resist.
The lilacs are a lot like people.
At my nursing job, I have a little lady (and I do mean little—she weighs in at a slight 86 pounds), who wants to die. She does not want to get out of bed, eat, do physical therapy, or talk to anyone. When I look at her emaciated frame lying in bed, there is a part of her that has receded. The part that holds the essence of her life force is in permanent hibernation. The internal pilot light of her soul is barely lit, and it is painfully obvious to everyone. Death is coming for a visit, and he will not leave empty-handed.
Her family is apoplectic. They want us to force her to eat and get out of bed. “Do something! Make her eat! She will eat if you just give her the food she likes!” they exclaim. And we try, we do. But it doesn’t do any good. She doesn’t want to live, and has made that clear, with every rejected bite of food and stern refusal to move an inch. Her caregivers come to me, palms open and facing skyward, and with halting broken English say, “She don’t want to do nothing. What I can do?”
I used to think that being a part of the world of medicine with all of its technology, medications, and vast knowledge, I would help keep people alive, no matter what. This was the naiveté that carried me through the first years of my nursing practice. We push the envelope on every front, breathing for people when their lungs don’t work, pumping them full of I.V. antibiotics when their immune systems are overwhelmed by infection, and stitching them back together when their bodies are ripped open by trauma. I was convinced that we medical professionals could beat back most of the tragedies that threaten to cut a life short. And we do manage to pull off a lot of major—and minor—miracles.
But what cannot be beaten back is that will. The will is more powerful than any surgery, treatment, or tincture. It has a veneer of iron, and when intentionally raised, is impenetrable to any curative weapon created by man. You can kill bacteria, but not the will of someone who has made up their mind to die.
Excerpt from the essay “I Stopped Fighting the Flowers”, Copyright 2009 Hudson.
LVN = Licensed Vocational Nurse
RN = Registered Nurse
That’s right, I am a nurse. I may have the letters LVN behind my name instead of RN, but that doesn’t mean you can talk to me like I’m a moron. Or ask me “Are you an RN?” and when I say, “No, I’m an LVN” you reply “Oh, uh-huh” as if that explains everything. As if I’m something smelly that you stepped in and want to wipe off your shoe so you can move on and find the realnurses.
Yes, LVNs go to school for a shorter period of time than RNs. And yes, our scope of practice is different, and our licensure limits us to certain nursing tasks. But what does the ‘N’ in LVN stand for? It stands for nurse, that’s what.
I don’t have anything against RNs. Heck, some of my closest friends are RNs. Once you spend some time with them you figure out they’re okay. They have a lot of responsibility and depending on the personality, they can wield their power like a light saber, cutting you down in their wake. They can make an LVN’s work life tough or easy. But if they’re not too drunk on their own power, most RNs will give a gal a chance to prove herself.
But let me tell it like it is. There are RNs who assume that LVNs, simply because of those pesky letters, aren’t qualified to clean a bedpan. There is a hierarchy, a caste system, that exists between RNs and LVNs. Some RNs look down their noses at us LVNs. Yeah, I’m talking to you. You know who you are.
Some of you think you’re better than us because you went to school for longer than we did and you can hang I.V. antibiotics and push medications, or because you get to play charge nurse and tell everyone else what to do. The idea that you would have to work elbow to elbow with one of our kind on a medical/surgical floor fills you with disdain. We couldn’t possibly be as smart or as capable as you, and you will spare no opportunity to remind us of that.
In this caste system known as nursing, everyone is kept in their place. We don’t want anyone thinking they are high-falutin’. And so it is that from the time I did my clinical rotations in nursing school until now some RNs still insist on treating me like a third class citizen. In the beginning of my nursing career this really bothered me, and I would vociferously defend myself to anyone who tried to put me down. As time went on, I learned that the best defense is a good offense. In the nursing world this means a solid skill set and consistently good nursing judgment. Through the years I’ve cultivated both. Despite this, the patronizing continues.
Hey, here’s a question: have I cleaned up any fewer body fluids, supported and comforted fewer patients, or handled emergencies less efficiently? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, I get turfed a lot of the really unappealing jobs because I’m lower on the food chain. This is especially true when I work as supplemental staff or as a travel nurse. Hey! Who’s up for a fecal disimpaction? No worries—the LVN will do it.
I’ve made mistakes but I’ve learned from them. This is very important in a profession where you hold peoples’ lives in your hands. If you can master critical thinking and throw in a dash of good old common sense, you will go far as a nurse. But critical thinking and common sense are not enough. We have to help each other succeed.
Excerpt from “The ‘N’ Stands for Nurse.” C–2010 Hudson.
In nursing school I completed several clinical rotations. I worked in hospitals taking care of medical and surgical patients and women who just had babies. I learned how to treat people with acute and chronic health problems and how to recognize when they were taking a detour off the road of recovery. The work was challenging, but the most interesting experience was my geriatric rotation at the Veterans’ nursing home in Denver, Colorado.
* * *
Probably erected sometime during World War II, the building still has a lot of the original equipment. And when I say original equipment, I’m including the staff. Most of them have been here so long, they’ve actually taken care of the guys returning from Vietnam. They enjoy horrifying the nursing students with stories of soldiers who had limbs blown off or were full of shrapnel, and take great pleasure in assigning us tasks where we have to dodge the highest possible amount of body fluids. They like to give us the creepy old guy who tries to cop a feel as you’re changing the dressing on his trachea site.
The patients have been here forever, too. One guy has been here for twenty-seven years, although looking at him I am hard pressed to tell. He has avoided many of the complications that can ravage a body that is immobile, like skin breakdown.
The staff is proud of the fact that his skin still looks so good after so much lying in bed. It’s true: the around-the-clock turning, range-of-motion exercises, and copious application of skin moisturizer pays visible dividends. But I wonder if the patient knows or cares. He is in a coma, after all. What good is all of this gloriously soft skin to him? It’s not like he can go out and woo women with it. Hey ladies, check it out. Look at my wonderfully intact dermis. This makes you hot, doesn’t it?
Prolonged bed rest causes other problems. Hospital-acquired infections (also known as nosocomial infections) are prevalent and can take a long time to treat. One such infection, known affectionately in medical circles as “c-diff”, short for Clostridium Difficile, affects the gastrointestinal tract. Sometimes it occurs as the result of continuous antibiotic use, and sometimes it happens because a patient’s immune system is weak. The infection sees an opportunity, finds a foothold, and digs its little bacterial feet into the gut.
There is a slightly sweet smell to c-diff, followed closely by a pungent smell of rotting flesh. It changes the consistency of the poop, too. Instead of a regular bowel movement, c-diff looks like a brownish-grayish gelatinous mess.
I don’t know that I am about to come nose to stink with this most foul of infections.
We arrive to start our shift on Monday at 7 a.m., eager, naïve little nursing students ready to serve and learn. In true “Let’s stick it to the newbies” fashion, they give me the guy with the worst c-diff—ever. We all knew who he is. I don’t need to know his name or room number; I just follow the smell.
Maria, one of my fellow students, leans over and says, “Make sure you wear a mask when you change his diaper, girl. That smell will kill you.” But I’m not allowed to wear a mask unless the patient has a contagious respiratory infection, and this man doesn’t. It is disrespectful to put on a mask just to block an odor from a patient. I can feel little beads of sweat start to form above my upper lip. I hope I can get through this without vomiting.
The morning goes fairly smoothly, or as smoothly as it can for a group of first-timers who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. The patients have lunch and then it’s time to put some of them back to bed. My c-diff patient is on the list. “But first”, our instructor advises, “make sure you clean them up before putting them to bed.” This means digging in and changing soiled diapers.
The time has come. Yowza. Here we go.
Maria is helping me with my patients. When we get to my c-diff guy, we take a deep breath—and hold it. We bring him into his room and it is obvious that his diaper needs changing. We get him into bed and start in earnest, trying our best not to show how disgusting it is. I look over at Maria, and she is twisting her face in sheer horror. I whisper, “Maria! Stop making that face! It’s disrespectful.”
I don’t want to make a face. Of course this is impossible. The stench coming from this guy’s butt is enough to make me want to pass out. It’s as if some small woodland creature has crawled up there and died. Judging by the stench, that little critter has been dead a long time.
It seems to take forever, but we finally finish and leave the room. As we’re walking down the hall, I glare at Maria. She looks at me and says, “What?” I say, “Why did you make that face? We’re supposed to respect the patient and not show how gross it is.” Maria keeps walking and in a casual voice replies, “You read this guy’s chart, right? You’re forgetting something.” I don’t know what she’s talking about. I’d read his chart, but it was one of probably fifteen I’d reviewed since working at the VA. It’s hard to keep track of everyone and their ailments.
Maria laughs. “We lucked out. That guy isn’t going to care that I made a face. Know why? Because he’s blind.”
Copyright 2009–Hudson.
I just started a new nursing gig: I am a clinical instructor in a vocational nursing program. I’m a little stunned with my new title, because I never thought I’d be a teacher.
For years, various people have told me that I should teach. I pooh-poohed the idea at every turn. What, me? A teacher? Nah, I can’t do that. I’m too anti-establishment, too much of a wild-child and rule breaker. With my personality, I don’t know if I can successfully lead others towards their career and academic goals.
You know what? I was wrong.
I really like teaching. I like seeing the look on a student nurse’s face when she goes from I-don’t-get-it-and-I’m-a-deer-in-headlights to Ah, now this is starting to make sense. That is a truly inspiring moment for me, and I want more. I am helping these students achieve their goals, and it’s cool being a part of that.
Who knew? I am a teacher.
Mother’s Day is hard for me. My mother died unexpectedly when I was twenty-three, and each minor and major holiday passing reminds me she’s not here. As Spring rolls into Summer, Mother’s Day and my birthday bring with them a twinge of sadness.
Mother’s Day in May and my birthday in June. My mom’s birthday was one day after mine, on June 5th. We used to celebrate our birthdays together. That made me feel special, as if I had a unique connection to my mom that my siblings didn’t share. If I was born so close to her birthday that must mean something, right? I was a little, albeit pudgy, gift sent as a special treat for her birthday. Last year on your birthday you didn’t have me; this year you do. How cool is that?
I wish we could still celebrate our birthdays together. I wish I could send her a Mother’s Day card thanking her for all she did for me growing up, because I never really appreciated her until after she was gone.
Maybe that’s why Mother’s Day is so hard. I should have told my mom how much she meant to me while she was still alive, and I didn’t. I missed my chance, and now she’s gone forever.