Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul (15 page)

My heart lifted when I saw the door of the courtyard open and Mrs. Freund lugging her shopping bag. She ambled casually around the flower border, looking right and left with a mischievous expression, as if violating some holy laws. Mrs. Oldman didn’t seem to notice I’d blocked her view from the window. Mrs. Freund tapped the window lightly then reached into her shopping bag. I stood back to watch Mrs. Oldman’s face. Never in my life will I forget that moment. At once she rose up, her face reddened, her eyes sparkled, and her voice broke as she cried, “Peppy! Peppy!”

“Shush—shush.” I tried to keep her quiet. Outside the window Peppy jumped and whined and, before realizing what I was doing, I opened the window and lifted the little dog out of the bag and into her outstretched arms. Mrs. Freund stood with her shopping bag wide open, beaming as if she’d seen a miracle, or rather, created one.

But then my heart bunched up in alarm for I heard the voice of Mrs. Green. No doubt she was looking for me.

“Quick, he has to go now.” I wrestled the struggling dog back into the shopping bag outside the window.

I could hear Mrs. Green’s firm step and voice as she shouted, “What do I hear? Is there a dog on the ward?”

Quickly, I grabbed Mrs. Oldman’s bedpan and stepped outside the curtain, trying to look busy and professional as I walked past Mrs. Green. “Back so soon?” I asked cheerfully.

“I thought I heard a dog,” she muttered, as if questioning me.

I answered with studied indifference. “Maybe a stray dog in the courtyard.”

Without a word she followed me out of the ward and into the utility room. I stopped short. The bedpan was empty. I hesitated. Mrs. Green waited. I didn’t know for what. I dared not show that the bedpan was empty for fear of blowing my cover. The silence grew, and my thoughts raced. Would I be reported to the director of nursing for breaking the law? I was still in my probation months. My mouth and throat felt so dry, I thought I might choke.

Mrs. Green didn’t look at me as she spoke. “Rules and regulations in a hospital are made for a reason. There are exceptions, though, and while I am against secrecy and breaking rules, there are times that it proves a better policy.”

I nodded sheepishly. When a patient’s call light sounded, I jumped. Mrs. Green said, “Take your bedpan. Mrs. Oldman likely needs it.”

She opened the door for me, and I hurried out into the ward, utterly perplexed. Mrs. Oldman had already bubbled joyfully to all about Peppy’s visit and how smart he was. I begged the other patients to keep his visit a secret, lest I lose my job. They all kept their solemn bond and that secret made them special friends with Mrs. Oldman. She thrived under their affection. She regained her interest and confidence in the future. She exercised with such eagerness and determination, it shamed people half her age.

Finally, she left the hospital, welcomed by a joyfully dancing and yelping Peppy.

Mrs. Green never mentioned the dog’s visit to me, but when I occasionally had to break rules for the sake of a patient, she was always mysteriously absent.

Lini R. Grol

“In obedience school he learned to HEAL.”

Reprinted by permission of Benita Epstein.

A Healing Truth

G
od offers to every mind its choice between
truth and repose. Take which you please; you
can never have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was seventeen years old, in my first year of nursing school, and moonlighting evening shifts as an emergency-room assistant. When the ER supervisor said, “Virginia! Take a gurney out to the chopper, STAT,” I jumped and shook like an aspen leaf. I had never retrieved a patient from a helicopter before. Four of us rushed two gurneys out to the waiting helicopter.

My head spun as the wind and noise of the whirring blades drowned out orders shouted by the nurses and paramedics. Two piles of oily black rags were placed on the gurneys, and we raced back to the ER as fast as the rough asphalt would allow.

Still in a daze, I slowly realized the black rags were two burn victims, a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. They had been driving through the canyon when an oil tanker jackknifed in front of them and burst into flames, turning the canyon into a fiery inferno. The two had managed to crawl through flames up the side of the canyon where the helicopter rescued them some time later.

These were the first burn victims I’d ever seen. The little girl’s left ear was partially burned away. She looked like a horrid pink and black plastic doll. Sickened by the smell of burnt flesh and hair, I initially wanted to just get away from the horror. But by the time we sent them to ICU, I was even more determined to be a nurse.

On another assignment a few weeks later, I was called to special duty to care for an unmanageable pediatric patient in four-point restraints. The charge nurse told me the child was spitting, swearing and biting anyone who came near her. Her family was at their wits’ end, yet asked that sedation be used sparingly, since it made her so groggy. The young girl hadn’t been bathed for two days.

With a sinking heart, I followed the charge nurse down a corridor that echoed with the child’s curses. I opened the door timidly and was struck in the face with spittle hurled by a matted, naked creature hissing under a canvas restraining jacket. The jacket was tangled under her chin and armpits, exposing her defiant kicking and thrashing. A wrinkled dressing partially covered her left ear. In shocked dismay, I realized this haunted creature was the little burn victim I had retrieved from the helicopter.

The charge nurse told me the child had recovered with only a shriveling of her left ear, but her mother had died after three days in the ICU.

“Whatever you do, don’t tell her that her mother is dead,” she ordered as she handed me the chart in the hall.

“Her family is trying to break the news to her gently, but she won’t listen.”

As I entered the room, the child screamed, “Get out! Don’t touch me!” Then, “Mama, Mama, Mama!” began her litany, interspersed between obscenities. Terrified, I began doing a miserable job of caring for this wounded, furious little animal.

I tried to feed her soup, but she splattered it over us both with her wild head jerks. She chewed paper straws I put to her lips, then sprayed the chewed paper like spit wads. When her father came that evening, I unsuccessfully tried to cover her nakedness, apologizing with crimson embarrassment at her disheveled state. I muttered helplessly to him as I hurried out of the room. He shook his head sadly, more familiar with his daughter’s behavior than I cared to imagine.

When her father left later, she yelled, “You’re stupid! Stupid!”

I fumbled for another hour attempting to reach past her fury. I inquired about her unopened gifts. I freshened her flowers. I tempted her with candy, and offered to read her stories and to watch television shows. Nothing worked.

After two hours of frustration, she changed her mantra just a bit, “You don’t know anything. Nobody knows anything. But I do. I know!” She finally screamed, “Tell me!”

Scared and shaken, I sat two feet in front of her and asked, “Tell you what?”

She eyed me through her tangled, teary mop, then yelled, “You’re just like the rest of them. You’ll just say the same thing!”

“What? What do you want to know?” I pleaded softly.

For the first time in six hours, she stopped struggling and cursing. She was so quiet I thought she had fallen asleep. Then a small whimper rose from the sheets, and I heard her muffled question, “Is my mother dead?”

The charge nurse’s warning flashed in my mind. I didn’t know how to answer without disobeying orders and possibly scarring the child for good if I answered truthfully. I remained silent, but the deadly quiet urged me to risk a tentative compromise. Steeling against her next wave of outrage, I asked quietly, “What do you think?”

“I think she is,” she said in a low monotone. “I think my mommy is dead. I can’t feel her anymore. She’s been dead for a long time.” I let her words hang in the air. She knew, without a trace of doubt.

I took a deep breath, prayed for forgiveness, and said, “You’re right, Hon. Your mommy is dead.”

At that, a loud wail rose from the rumpled sheets, a helpless, lonely one that swelled and dropped without fury, without resistance, without hope. I cried for her loss, then for my loss of any hope of becoming a nurse. When they found out I told her, I’d be fired and barred from any nursing school anywhere.

Her wails finally shuddered to hiccups. “My father kept sa-saying she was in hea-heaven. Whenever I asked where she was, everyone said she’s in a be-better place.” Her voice trailed off into soft sobbing again, and then she added miserably, “I need a bra and I don’t want my father to get me one. I want my mommy to. . . .” Her sorrow rose again, breaking both our hearts.

Slowly, over the last two hours of the shift, I undid her restraints, bathed her, changed her sheets and dressed her in one of her new nighties. We opened her gifts and she wrote thank-you cards to her family. We cried now and then, and she let me hold her whenever a new wave of sorrow swelled through her.

Before settling in for her first night of unrestrained sleep in weeks, she read to me the words she had just written on the front page of her new diary, “My mother is in my heart and Virginia is going to be a nurse. She will be a very good nurse.”

I fiercely prayed she was right.

When I finished my detailed report that night, the charge nurse patted my hand and said, “Well done, Virginia. Well done.”

The child went home the next day.

Two years later, I graduated as a registered nurse— hopefully, “a very good nurse.”

Virginia L. Clark

Finding Your Easter Sunrise

T
he longer I live, the more convincing proof I
see of this truth, that God governs the affairs of
man.

Benjamin Franklin

There is a stopping point in the North Carolina mountains called Pretty Place. Pull off the main road and follow a dirt one to a clearing, and there stands an open-air chapel on the side of the mountain. Simple concrete benches encompass a stone pulpit. The area is open on all sides so you can see the breathtaking beauty of the scenery. A feeling of reverence permeates the place. People talk quietly, as though in church, in this wonderful place of solitary reflection.

At Easter time about twenty years ago, a group of friends and I decided to attend the sunrise service at Pretty Place. I had always wanted to go but never managed. I was an emergency-room nurse and had to work on this particular Easter Sunday, too, but worked it out to go to the service, and then go to work my shift. We got up about 2:00 A.M. to make the drive to Pretty Place. We arrived in the dark, parked and proceeded toward the chapel. A huge gathering of people collected in and around the chapel. In darkness, a simple nondenominational church service was held including a hymn, a prayer and a short message.

I was content just to sit and enjoy the tranquility, the smell of earth and pine, and feel the coolness of the morning air on my skin. I heard the birds and the sounds of the woods around us and enjoyed the pleasure of being with my friends. The sky lightened as the day broke and a glowing orange ball began to appear as if it was rising out of the earth. One minute there was a gray canvas and the next, a glowing sphere of orange, yellow and pink rose, filling the sky. Then, more quickly than they had come, the crowd took their leave to return to the real world. I headed for work.