Impotent Fury

Following is a story about my early years of nursing. I'd gone into nursing right out of high school and started my career at the age of nineteen. Here I am, ...years later (lots of them!) still at it.

I was a nineteen year old Licensed Vocational Nurse, fresh out of training and assigned to the amputee and fracture ward of a large rehabilitation hospital in Los Angeles County. One of my charges was an eighteen year old man who was in the hospital to be fitted with artificial limbs following a horrible accident.

His accident happened when he was running away from home and hopped a freight train to “get him as far away as he could possibly go”. At some point in the journey, he fell off the moving train and was sucked underneath the wheels. He suffered a head injury; his left arm was cut off just below the shoulder, his left leg at the hip, and his right leg just below the knee. The heat from the moving wheels cauterized the open wounds so that he did not bleed to death. The head injury resulted in him having frequent, very violent grand mal seizures during which he always bit his tongue and bled profusely. His speech was also affected and he spoke in agonizingly slow sentences.

Following his recovery from the acute injuries, he was sent to us to be fitted with prosthesis for his right leg and his left arm, the goal being to make him a bit more independent. If he could stand on the right leg, he could get in and out of his bed and wheelchair on his own.

John had a temper that frequently exploded. It was rumored that some time earlier, in a fit of rage, he had smothered his baby niece to death with a pillow. I was never able to find out if that had truly occurred or not, but in all the time he was a patient on our unit, I never saw or met a family member.

He would wheel himself around the ward using his good right arm to propel his wheelchair. This resulted in that arm developing into a hugely muscular lethal weapon. We all knew to keep far away when he was having one of his frequent fits of temper. If he got hold of you with that arm, it was extremely difficult to get loose, and often, he aimed for the throat.

Since I was the youngest woman around, and he was a young man, he would follow me around all evening like a puppy, trying to stay in my good graces. I could usually get him to cooperate, even when he was in a foul mood. One night, he was really getting on my nerves and was being terribly rude. I told him he needed to go to the hospital library and check out a book on Emily Post so he could study proper etiquette. Little did I know this would come back to haunt me.

A month or so later, I was taking my evening dinner break in our small break room off of the nurse’s station. Patients knew they weren’t supposed to disturb us while we were on our break, but rules mattered little to John so I wasn’t surprised when he wheeled his chair into the room. I was enjoying a dinner of fried chicken until John spoke.

“Miss...Judkins. Don’t...you...know, you’re not supposed...to eat chicken...with your hands...you’re supposed to...eat...it with a knife...and fork.”

I haven’t been able to eat fried chicken since without thinking of John and the night he one-upped me.