Personal thank you to my Doctor

It was all in a day's work

To her

Snipping the diseased part

Of my body

Little did she know

The change

Her day's work would make

On my life

I'd become imprisoned

Caged

Unable to live life as I'd

Known it

Chained to my home

The bathroom

Unable to do what

I wanted

She assured me she could do it

She'd done many on her own

She had no doubts

Neither did I

Here I am fifteen years later

Able to live

To  do

To create

To enjoy

To travel the world

To help others in need

I hope she stops every now and then

And knows

The impact she's had

On me.

THE DASHING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

     One evening I arrived at work, walked onto the ward, and was greeted by the sight of Mr. Sims swinging himself by both arms while hanging from the trapeze bar over his bed. I looked towards the nurse's station and saw that the RN, Mrs. Brown, was on the phone. I hoped she was calling the doctor to help Mr. Sims.

     Mr. Sims was a tanned, wiry little man who lived in the Imperial Valley in California, close to the Mexican border. He was a farmer and grew alfalfa, barley and cotton on his acres. He'd been involved in an accident with farm equipment and lost both of his legs just above the knees. He was admitted to our unit to be fitted with artificial legs, rehabilitated, and ultimately sent back home to his farm. Mr. Sims was a humble man, quiet, and very polite. What we didn't know about him was he was also a closet alcoholic. He'd kept that little tidbit of information from us during his admission interview. Him swinging naked from the trapeze was our first clue he might be having DT's.

     Mrs. Brown called his family in Brawley and they confirmed that Mr. Sims was indeed a drinker and had been without alcohol since coming to our hospital three days earlier. Perfect timing for withdrawal. Mrs. Brown then called the doctor on call and received orders to give the patient Paraldehyde injections. Now there are much better medications, but in 1968, this was all we had. Paraldehyde was a thick, viscous solution, that smelled to high heaven of a strong chemical with a little vinegar mixed in. The odor is very distinctive and can be smelled on the breath of anyone who takes it. It had to be drawn out of the vial using large bore needles, and then injected slowly into a large muscle. Guess who got that job?

     I drew the medication dose up in two syringes, enlisted the help of several nurse aides, and went to Mr. Sims bedside. There was no reasoning with Mr. Sims, so we had to pry his hands free from the trapeze bar and get him back onto the mattress. This was no small feat. Mr. Sims was little, but he was powerful from all his years of farm work. We finally got him down and turned onto his stomach so I could inject each syringe fully into the large muscle on his backside. He screamed like a banshee throughout the whole procedure, but eventually settled down and went to sleep. Within a couple of days he was back to being his normal, polite and kind self. We couldn't resist teasing him a bit about his flying trapeze act, though. He did recover, get two new prosthetics for legs, and went back to Brawley to his farm. I hope he didn't start drinking again, but life experience tells me he most likely did.

Darkness

I feel the darkness descending on me. It's been away for a long, long, time, but now I think I'll allow it to visit for a bit. I'm in need of a bit of introspection. It fuels my creative energies. Like Hemingway. Not to say that I'm really like Hemingway. Just dark right now like he was. I've been shelving my negative thoughts at the advice of the positive minded gurus I listen to on the radio. Sometimes you just have to let the sadness in. This is a sad world and I've witnessed more than my share of sadness. Not in my personal life per se, but in the lives of others that have touched me.

Since I started working for hospice 16 years ago, I've kept a journal of all the patients I've cared for. I finally stopped adding to the journal, there were just too many deaths, but last night I looked through it. All those faces came back to me in an instant. They haven't been put as far away as I thought. All that pain and suffering.

SOMEONE PLEASE SCRATCH THAT ITCH!

My evening shift was going along smoothly until the nurse’s aide ran into the medicine room to tell me she wasn’t going anywhere near one of the patients she was assigned to because there were worms all over his bed. I stopped what I was doing, locked the medication room door, and went to investigate.


The patient was a young man in his early twenties who’d been in a motorcycle accident. He'd suffered a severe head injury and numerous broken bones. The unit I was working on was the amputee and fracture ward, so once his condition had stabilized in the acute care hospital, he’d been transferred to us for rehabilitation. He was recovering some from the head injury and was starting awaken from his coma, but not enough to understand where he was or what had happened to him. His right leg was in a cast from his toes to the middle of his thigh and was suspended in the air by traction that was connected to pins running through the bones in two places.

I approached the bed and noticed he was extremely restless and agitated. When I pulled the sheet back to inspect his leg, I found there were indeed many crawly things coming out of the top of the cast, hence the source of his agitation. Maggots. Hundreds and hundreds of maggots had hatched and were now crawling around on his skin and out the top of the cast. There were so many of them they were now falling onto the floor.

Three of the nurse’s aides were standing nearby, watching me expectantly. I told them they couldn’t just leave him like that and the worms were not going to hurt them so they needed to clean him up. I went back to the nurse’s station to call the doctor, and when I turned to check on the aides, the three were still huddled together and looking at me like I was crazy.

I placed a call to the doctor, an overworked and crabby resident who probably hadn’t slept in days, and told him the problem. He wasn’t familiar with the patient and didn’t think the situation was in any way urgent enough to bother him with. He told me not to worry about the maggots, there was probably an open wound under the cast that was infected, and the maggots would clean the wound out by eating all the dead tissue. He said to send the patient to the cast room the next day to have the cast removed and replaced.

Glancing back over at the young man who was writhing in bed in obvious discomfort, I knew this situation may not be urgent to the doctor but it certainly was urgent to the man lying in the bed. I went back to the medication room and opened a corner cupboard where I knew little used medications were kept. I took out a can that had been sitting there for months and looked at the label. Ether. I’d heard stories from older nurses about using ether to kill maggots in wounds, so I made a decision. I took the can back out to the patient’s bedside, opened it, and poured the contents inside the cast. Within seconds, all of the maggots outside of the cast were dead, so I assumed the ones inside were dead, too. The young man settled down and went to sleep after the nurse’s aides came to change his sheets and make him comfortable.

He went for a cast change the next day and I feared that when I came back to work there would be many questions about how the maggots had died. To my relief, no one asked me anything when I reported for duty the next evening.

Happily, this young man recovered from all of his injuries and was able to walk out of the hospital on his own. I’m sure he had a long recovery period, more because of his head injury than the broken bones, but hopefully he went on to live a full life. And I hope he stayed off motorcycles.

THE NIGHT I'LL NEVER FORGET

In the early 1980’s, I spent many nights working in the intensive care units of hospitals in Orange County. My children were small and I’d found a way to work and still be home with them during the day when they needed me. My husband would come home and care for them in the evening on the nights I worked. My shifts were twelve hours long, from seven in the evening to seven in the morning, and I was able to make the same amount of money two days a week that I made in a forty hour work week at my prior job. I worked for a nursing registry that sent me to different hospitals each night, and this particular night I was working in Garden Grove.


Each hospital had their own distinct way of handling the registry nurses. Some of the charge nurses would assign the registry nurse the easier patients to care for and give the more complex patients to their own staff. Other charge nurses would give the registry nurses the most difficult assignments and let the regular staff take it easy.

The charge nurse in the Garden Grove Hospital assigned the most critically ill patient to herself, which was a tremendous relief to me. The patient was a twelve year old boy who had been hit by a car earlier that day and suffered a horrendous head injury. His head was swathed in a huge white turban of gauze and his eyelids were bruised purple and swollen shut. Drainage tubes emerged from the gauze and were connected to a glass bottle which was filling with pinkish liquid indicating it was cerebral spinal fluid mixed with blood.

A tube was inserted through his mouth and into his lungs, and connected to a respirator that did all the breathing for him. Intravenous lines ran into both his arms and a foley catheter kept his bladder empty as the clear yellow urine slowly drained into a bag hanging on the side of the bed.

The boy didn’t move a muscle, and the charge nurse rarely left his side. The ICU was a tiny one with only four beds, so we were all in close proximity to the critical situation and were there to help when the need arose. She would call one of us over to stand guard when she absolutely had to take a bathroom break, but the rest of the time she was the one right there with him.

His parents and older sister wandered in and out all night long. They’d stand by his side and stroke his hand, speaking softly to him, crying and hugging one another.

Around three in the morning, the boy’s heart monitor and blood pressure readings changed significantly, letting us know that he was dying. We rushed to the waiting room and called for his family to come in. They stood at the bedside as he died, weeping uncontrollably. His sister cried out, “Do something! He can’t die. He’s the only brother I’ve got.”

Oh, how I wish we could have done something. All we could do was watch and weep ourselves. It was out of our hands. I can’t think about that little boy or his family without tears coming to my eyes still.

I walked out of the hospital at the end of my shift and thought I would never set foot in one again. Be still, my soul.

APPALACHIA IN ORANGE COUNTY

In my part-time work as a hospice nurse I’m often sent to see patients I know little about. I view it as an adventure and also as an opportunity to put the pieces of a puzzle together. One day in early summer, I was sent to see an elderly lady in Orange County, California, who was dying of end stage dementia. The only information I was given was her name, address, and telephone number. I looked it up on my street map since it was in the days prior to GPS, and made my way there. I turned into an ordinary working class neighborhood of one story ranch style California homes, located the street and found the house number on the mail box at the curb.


This particular house sat at the end of a long driveway and was obscured from view by many fruit trees and tall weeds in the front yard. I retrieved my medical bag and notebook and started down the drive. Lined along one side were several junk cars that seemed to be slowly rusting into the ground. The house came into view and seated in a rocking chair on the front porch was a very fat, old, toothless man smoking a pipe. He smiled at me as I walked up and told me to “just go right on in the house”.

I opened the door and stepped inside. I’d only taken a couple of steps when I had to stop, not sure whether what I was seeing was real or a hallucination. The house was dark, dirty, and dreary. What were formerly drapes now hung at the windows in shreds that resembled ropes. To block out the light, someone had taped big pieces of cardboard to the windows, and old sofas lined the walls of the living room. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I realized there were bodies covered with blankets lying on the sofas. Various bodily noises were frequently being emitted from these lumps under the covers, the odor in the house attested to the origin of the noises.

Trash, newspapers, and junk were piled everywhere. I wondered where I would find my patient in all of this, then finally located her lying in a hospital bed in what would have been the dining room of the home. She was clean and her clothing and bed linens were clean as well, much to my surprise and relief. I took a disposable plastic barrier from my bag and placed it on top of a stack of newspapers so I had a sanitary place to put my bag and notebook. I was getting ready to examine the patient when I heard footsteps coming down the hall. Expecting to greet the patient’s son, I was dismayed to find myself face to face with a man wearing only a towel. He’d apparently just come from the shower. When I inquired if he was the son, he said no, and shouted out the son’s name.

Soon, Billy appeared. He was a younger version of the elderly man on the porch. Billy wore overalls that were filthy, and he didn’t have a shirt, so I was treated to the sight of major chest hair and pretty foul body odor.

Billy greeted me with great enthusiasm and said he was just about to get his mom up to the commode by her bed and then I could do my exam. He lifted the lid of the commode, and I was again dismayed to see it was filled almost to the brim with bodily waste. Apparently it was the real source of the odor in the house. Billy explained without apology that the toilet wasn’t working so he couldn’t empty the contents of the commode. I didn’t bother to ask what the rest of the residents of the house did when they needed to use the toilet.

I finished my exam, checked the patient’s medications, and gave him some more supplies to help him care for his mother. I stood up to write my nursing notes as I balanced them on the patient’s chart, as there wasn’t a clean place to sit. I exited the house as soon as I could.

Billy met me outside with a paper bag. He thanked me for the visit and told me there were homegrown tomatoes in the bag. I thanked him for the gift and said homegrown tomatoes were one of my very favorite things, and I took them to my car. Once home I scrubbed them with soap and water and laid them on paper towels in the kitchen to dry. That’s where they stayed until my husband decided to eat them, telling me I was being silly not wanting to touch them. I couldn’t bring myself to take even one bite, and still wonder what kind of fertilizer grew such beautiful tomatoes.

Side Show Mary

Mary, a lady in her late thirties, was admitted to our unit for help with weight loss. She’d been the circus fat lady for one of the major big top circuses for a number of years, but once she’d gotten so heavy she wasn’t able to walk, she became bed bound in her home. A family member finally called the fire department and when they arrived, they sawed around her door to make it wide enough to get Mary out, and then brought her to our hospital. When she arrived, we weren’t able to get an accurate weight but knew that she was well over 750 pounds. Our transportation gurney weighed 250 pounds and when we loaded Mary on and took her to the freight scales, the needle buried on the other side of 1000 pounds.


In those days, there weren’t any king size hospital beds available for patients so the engineering department of the hospital bolted two hospital beds together for Mary. When we needed to provide Mary with care, we would have to climb up onto the bed with her; otherwise we couldn’t reach far enough across her body to properly bathe her. Bedpan time was a major event. It took several nurses to get the pan positioned correctly underneath her and then to get it back out again and clean and dry her.

Mary, who loved to eat, was placed on a 300 calorie diet. The weight immediately started melting off. Saturday was weight day and it took most of the staff to get her loaded onto the gurney and pushed to the freight scales. The hospital was very old and our unit was on the second floor. The elevator was also old and a bit temperamental. We were all afraid to get on the elevator with her, so we devised a system of pushing Mary in so her head was facing the door and she could push the elevator buttons herself. Then we would run down the stairs to the first floor and greet her when the elevator doors opened. We used the excuse that the elevator was too small to hold all of us, and we never let on that we feared it would break under the strain of her weight.

I remember the day the needle on the scale finally dipped below the 1000 pound mark, meaning that Mary weighed 750 pounds. We all cheered and clapped, and Mary even offered up a little smile for us. From then on we were able to monitor and chart her progress. The doctors had set a goal of getting her down to 300 pounds so they could perform a new surgical procedure on her. That goal was met nine months after Mary’s admission to our hospital, and an intestinal bypass surgery was performed. A large portion of the middle of her intestines was bypassed so that a good amount of the food she ate was not absorbed. Complications were terrible and she had chronic diarrhea and electrolyte imbalances. Sadly, six weeks after having undergone the surgery and now weighing 250 pounds, Mary died from liver failure. We now know that intestinal bypass surgery had a 50% mortality rate. I still feel a deep sadness when I think about Mary spending so many months eating almost nothing, finally being able to once again get out of bed and walk a short distance and losing two thirds of her body weight, only to die of complications from an experimental surgery. And that was more than forty years ago.

NO WINING...Nurse Story

THE LIONESS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY, BUT SHE SURE IS BEAUTIFUL EVEN AFTER HAVING JUST EATEN A WART HOG. I TOOK THE PICTURE!

Millie was ninety-five years old and on Hospice for end stage cardiac disease. She and her daughter, Dena, lived together in Millie’s home. Millie was weak and fatigued, but didn’t require a lot of care when she first came on service. She was mentally very alert and I enjoyed my visits with her immensely.

We’d discussed her smoking when she’d first been admitted to the hospice program. She’d tried to quit over the years and she and her doctor had agreed that there wasn’t much point in quitting now when she was at the end of her life. My opinion was the same, and I let her know that. Dena didn’t want her to smoke in the house, so she’d made a little area in the garage for Millie to go to when she wanted to smoke. Millie went out a few times in the day and evening to have a cigarette.

One day, shortly after I’d arrived for the visit, Dena walked in from the garage carrying a wine glass. She said, “Mother, how many times do I have to ask you to bring your wine glasses back into the house?”

At this, Millie’s head whipped around and she looked guiltily at me. “I like to have a glass or two of wine in the evening, is that all right?” she asked.

I smiled and patted her hand. “I like a glass of wine in the evening, too. If it’s okay with your doctor, it’s okay with me.”

Millie breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, I’m so glad you don’t think badly of me. What kind of wine do you like?”

“Oh, my favorite is chardonnay.”

“That’s my favorite, too!” she said, beaming. “Would you like a glass?”

I chuckled at this and said, “Not right now, Millie. I’m working and can’t drink on the job. Thank you for offering, though.”

She smiled, too, and said, “Oh good, because I would have been really worried if you’d said yes.”

Vodka Gimlet Anyone?

OKAY, THE PIG HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY...I JUST THINK SHE'S CUTE.

One of the first nurses I worked with when I started on the evening shift was Carrie Ellen Hair, a 72 year old woman who had never married. This was in 1967 and we were still required to wear white dress uniforms and nurse’s caps, but Carrie Ellen looked like she was stuck in the 1930’s. She was a petite, slender little woman who wore her short graying brown hair in a bob. Her white nurse’s uniforms were starched crisply. They buttoned at the neck, and the long sleeves buttoned at her wrists. Her skirts stopped at mid-calf length. Perched on her head was an enormous nurse’s cap with several black stripes running horizontally and a school pin tacked on one of the “wings”. She wore white support stockings and white nurse’s shoes. Her fingernails were cut as short as they could possibly be, and she never wore a trace of makeup.

Carrie Ellen ran a tight ship on the ward, too. She bustled around and made sure everyone was doing their assigned jobs. She didn’t tolerate slacking off on the job. The hospital was a county hospital and there were a number of slackers that worked there, so they kept Carrie Ellen quite busy.

I was a Licensed Vocational Nurse at the time so I was either the treatment nurse or the medication nurse, depending on the whim of the other LVN I worked with. I was the new kid in town so I just did what I was told. I worked hard and was a fast learner, so over time, Carrie Ellen took me under her wing and became my mentor.

Carrie Ellen was such a prim and proper little woman that I was shocked the evening she invited me to her apartment after work for a vodka gimlet. She whispered the invitation to me and asked me to please never tell anyone about it. I went, and enjoyed a frosty vodka gimlet in Carrie Ellen’s tidy apartment. She told me about her life and family in Texas, and made me promise again not to ever let anyone know she had an occasional drink. I suspected it was more than occasional because they tasted pretty darned good.

A couple of years later, Carrie Ellen retired and moved back to Texas to be near her family. She kept in touch for awhile and had gotten a part time job working in a nursing home in Texas. She just couldn’t give up her nursing career. It was how she defined herself and she would have been lost without it.

ALCOHOL? THERE'S NO ALCOHOL HERE.

Here's another story about my early nursing years. Hope you enjoy it.

Alcohol consumption was against the rules in the rehabilitation hospital. Still, it frequently appeared and was hard to keep under control. Most of the patients we cared for were young men who had their body images violently altered through accidents and injuries. In those days, doctors didn’t believe in medicating or sedating, so the patients did it themselves with alcohol.


The original buildings were built in 1888 and the wards I worked on were probably built in the 1930’s. They were long open wards with a nurse’s station in the middle, dividing it in two. Each ward held 60 patients. A hallway in the center connected our ward to the one next door and there were outside doors at each end, so it was easy for people to sneak in and out if they wanted to, and the patients had free run of the grounds until bedtime.

If we suspected a patient of drinking, we were allowed to search through all of their belongings and dispose of any alcohol we found. I don’t know how many bottles of whiskey and vodka I poured down the drain during those years, but it was quite a lot.

One man fooled us all, though, and it wasn’t until the day he was getting ready to go home that I got him to confess his secret to me. I joked with and cajoled him as he packed his belongings, and when he started to empty out his nightstand, he pulled out a large bottle of blue mouthwash and handed it to me. The label read Micrin Mouthwash, but when I removed the cap and sniffed, it was obvious it was pure alcohol. All the months he was there he’d managed to continue to drink by adding blue food coloring to vodka and keeping his mouthwash bottle full. No one was ever able to trick me with that one again.

Life Lessons

When I was now in the third grade, my new best friend, Karla Porter, happened to live in a nursing home. Her mother, Catherine, owned a big, two story house on the edge of town. The family lived in the upper story, and Catherine housed elderly patients on the first floor. Since I lived just a block away, Karla and I were in and out of the house every day. We’d wander through the hospital beds on the first floor, looking for Catherine or for something to do to keep us out of the trouble we invariably got ourselves into.


Sometimes Catherine would assign us small chores. One of those was to retrieve the eating utensils that Daisy had hidden away in her room. Daisy was an elderly woman with some kind of mental illness. She seemed to have multiple personalities, and spent most of the day carrying on conversations with these different personalities. She lived in a small bedroom that had to be kept locked to keep her from wandering off. When the utensil supply ran low, one of us girls would stand outside Daisy’s big bay window and distract her while the other one ran in the room and quickly grabbed the silverware from Daisy’s many hiding places. The one that was in charge of distracting Daisy had a big responsibility since she’d become very angry at the girl that was stealing the silver, and smack her over the head. I was usually in charge of distracting her since Karla was much faster at swiping the utensils.

Karla’s mom, Catherine, and my mom, Kathryn, were our Camp Fire Girl’s den leaders. The meetings were always held in the nursing home so Catherine wouldn’t be too far away from her charges. We spent much of our grade school years playing in the nursing home and my mom worked there occasionally when we needed some extra money. I wasn’t really surprised when years later my mom decided to become a nurse, and then Karla and I chose nursing, too.

Catherine Porter thought it was important for us to learn about all aspects of life. Later on in my life I grew to questions some of her ideas, but as children, we went along with the ride. One of those rides took Catherine, Karla, and my mother and I to the Clarinda, Iowa mental hospital grounds. It was an all day trip and I remember we didn’t even get out of the car. We parked in a parking lot and a few of the residents of the hospital who were allowed to roam the grounds, peered in the car windows at the four of us. To this day, I don’t know what the purpose of that particular field trip was, but I’m sure Catherine thought she was teaching us something important.

My family attended the First Baptist Church in Indianola, Iowa when I was a child. Church services were conservative and dignified, and our preachers were not of the evangelical type. Catherine seemed to think I was missing out on something, so when the tent preachers came to town, she would take Karla and I with her to the revivals. I guess she thought we would benefit from being saved, but no matter how many times we “went forward”, we never became “one with the spirit”.

The summer of 1962, my family moved to southern California. Later that year, Catherine sold her nursing home and moved her family to southern California, too. Catherine’s had a husband, Russell, who was more than twenty years older than her. She was the one who supported the family and made all the decisions and when she decided to move to California, they moved. Though we attended different high schools, this move made it possible for Karla and me to remain best friends and for Catherine to continue trying to give us life lessons.

She made one more attempt at “saving” us after moving to California. They lived in Artesia and Catherine found an evangelical church there and started attending regularly. One weekend when I’d slept over Saturday night, she woke us up on Sunday morning to get ready for church. We tried to protest but to no avail. We were sent to Sunday School class before the church services, and that went well. But then we were ushered over to the church and the fun began. This particular church encouraged participation by all members, and it heated up into a frenzy pretty quickly. When a very pregnant woman started speaking in tongues and fell to the floor in a quivering heap, it was too much for us. Karla and I started giggling and soon were doubled over with laughter, tears streaming down our faces. An embarrassed Catherine ushered us out as quickly as she could, and never forced us to attend church with her again.

I loved to do hair when I was in high school and soon became the hair expert. I was often called on to help my friends tease and pouf their hair into the elaborate styles of the early sixties. My friend’s mothers would also pay me to comb out their hair, tease it, and restyle it between their weekend hair appointments. By this time, Catherine had found work in a nursing home in Whittier, California. They were having a hard time finding a hairdresser to come in and do the patients hair, so she hired me. For one whole summer I posed as a hairdresser, cutting, shampooing and styling all the little gray heads in the nursing home. Now that I’m older and wiser, I realize how illegal it was, but at the time it was just a lot of fun and the little old ladies loved me.

Catherine wasn’t the only source of my introduction to nursing. In high school, I became a candy striper and worked at Whittier Presbyterian Hospital. I started out working in the central supply area, putting together admission kits for patients. The other candy stripers and I would fill plastic bags with wash basins, emesis basins, tissue boxes, Cepacol mouthwash and body lotion. The work was boring but you had to start there and prove yourself or you’d never be allowed out on the floors with actual patients. After awhile, I earned my way onto the floors. I filled water pitchers, delivered dinner trays, changed the water in flower arrangements, and had plenty of opportunities to interact with patients. I loved the atmosphere of the hospital and couldn’t wait to become a nurse.

The summer following my high school graduation was precious to me as it was the last months of my childhood. In order to enter the Registered Nursing program in September of that year, I would have to take chemistry during the summer and I preferred going to the beach and lying in the sun. My mom had gone through the Licensed Vocational Nursing program during my senior year in high school, so I decided that would be good for me, too. Karla and I applied to and were accepted into the Licensed Vocational Nursing program instead of RN training.

I was eighteen and Karla seventeen when we started our LVN training program. We dressed in our white starched blouses, yellow starched pinafores, white nurse’s cap, and white stockings and shoes and were on our way.

I’m amazed now that we were mature enough to make it through the program. Sometimes it didn’t seem that way. We were always professional and worked hard when we were out on the floor with patients, but we were in trouble a lot during our classroom hours. We found it extremely difficult to be quiet and pay attention, and did a lot of giggling and talking in class. Fortunately, each of us was the favorite of one of the instructors. The head of the program liked me, but didn’t like Karla, and one of the other instructors liked Karla, but not me. We were always being protected by someone. It also helped that we were both excellent students and quick learners and the patients we were assigned liked us, too.

One incident could have gotten both of us in really big trouble if we’d been found out. We were practicing injections in class one day. We were using large needles to draw up sterile water out of a vial and inject it into oranges in order to practice our technique. Some of the others weren’t catching on as fast as Karla and I, and we got bored pretty fast. I don’t know who started it, but we started squirting each other with the water in the syringes. I was spraying Karla and she tried to hit me. The needle jabbed into her arm and I was still pushing the plunger of the syringe. It squirted enough sterile water into her arm to raise a lump the size of a golf ball. When we realized what had happened, we looked around quickly to see if anyone noticed, then turned our attention back to the oranges.

Twelve months passed by and we graduated, took our nursing exams, and got jobs. I was nineteen and Karla eighteen then. She took a job in a nursing home and I went to work at a one thousand bed rehabilitation hospital operated by Los Angeles County. My education really began there.

Be Still My Soul

We come into this world with a huge imperfection...an enormous hole in our soul. It is our job to learn how to fill this hole. Some try to fill it with alcohol, drugs, sex, food. Others with mysticism, psychic encounters, meditation, AA, shopping, or self punishment. This book is filled with stories of the people I have encountered in my life’s journey, and how they have helped to fill the hole in my soul.









THE MAKING OF A NURSE



Grandma Grace died on August 4, 1954. I was six years old and stood outside her bedroom with my nose pressed against the window pane watching my Grandpa cry, his face in his hands.

I walked around the side of the house to the porch and found my dad holding Mom in his arms while she cried on his shoulder.

“Your grandma just passed away,” Dad said to me.

“I already know,” I replied,

Dad gave me a puzzled look, turned back to comfort my Mom.

I understood a lot despite my young age, having spent most of that summer in 1954 at my grandparent’s home while my mom and my Uncle Richard helped care for Grandma during her final days battling leukemia. I’d watched my family give Grandma pain medication, bathe her, turn her over, change her clothes, and empty the colostomy bag she’d worn for many years.

I liked that she was in her own bed in her own home. I also liked that my brother and I could go in and climb up on the bed and visit with her on the days when she felt well enough. On the days that she didn’t, I’d stand outside her window and wave. She called me her little butterfly at the window.

As sad as it was for me to lose my beloved grandmother, the way she died seemed so peaceful and natural that I’ve carried the memory of it with me my entire nursing career.

North From Alaska

I'm writing a book of stories based on my nursing career. I've decided to share them on my blog. Here's the first:

June, a 67 year old woman on our hospice program for lung cancer that had metastasized to her bones, was in tremendous pain, both physical and spiritual. The physical pain was due to the cancer, the spiritual pain due to the hole in her soul. She’d had several failed marriages and her three children hadn’t grown to be the successful individuals she’d hoped for. Her oldest daughter, Julie, wasn’t allowed inside her home because she would steal anything she could, including money and the drugs we prescribed for her mother. June had custody of Julie’s three year old son due to Julie being confined in prison for drug abuse and grand theft. Now she was out but apparently hadn't been rehabilitated.


June’s second daughter, Betty, lived with her, along with Betty’s two young sons. Betty also had a criminal record and was on house arrest for one month during the year I was seeing June. Her arrest was for forging checks. The Judge decided on house arrest so she could supervise her two sons and care for her mom. Betty was a pleasant though ineffective caregiver. She probably had attention deficit disorder and didn’t understand the instructions I gave her on how to care for her mom. When Betty’s charming and handsome husband, Eric, was released from prison after his most recent stay, he also moved into the house. Betty’s attention then turned to keeping Eric happy, and she did little to care for her mom.

After much prodding from me and the hospice social worker, the family contacted their brother, Mark, who lived in Alaska. Mark arrived along with his girlfriend, Debbie, and moved into the house with all the rest of the family.

I arranged a meeting with Mark for the day after his arrival. When the door opened, I was greeted by a bear of a man with the most beautiful blue eyes I’d ever seen. They didn’t look like they belonged on this man, but if the eyes are the windows to the soul; I was soon to learn this man’s soul was as beautiful as his eyes. His gray hair was long and stringy, rather thin on top, and a huge gray beard that hung halfway down his chest. It stopped at his enormous belly that looked as if he had a full term baby inside. He was fond of going without a shirt and the sight of his huge stomach and tattooed arms took a bit of getting used to.

However, Mark was a natural caregiver. He cooked for his mom, fed her when she couldn’t eat, took her to the bathroom, bathed and kept her in clean clothing and bed linens. He monitored her medications carefully and kept them under lock and key. Though he had spent time in prison on drug charges and was currently on parole, there were never any drugs missing once Mark took over his mom’s care.

Many times I would arrive to find Mark grieving over the impending loss of his mom and the many regrets over the choices he’d made in life. On those days, tears would fill his blue eyes and pour down his cheeks once they’d dropped off his long, curly black eyelashes. All I saw when I looked at him were his eyes and what lay behind them. I knew the rest of the world would probably never get to know what a tender, loving man he really was.

One day I arrived for my visit and Mark answered the door wearing sunglasses. After a few minutes, he asked me to take a look at his eye, saying it was bothering him. When he took the glasses off, I gasped at the sight of his formerly blue left eye that was now completely black. On closer inspection, I found that his pupil was completely dilated. He denied injuring it and when I pressed, he finally confessed he’d put his mother’s “eye drops” in his eye since it was irritating him. Puzzled, I asked him to show me the eye drops. He came back with the bottle of Atropine eye drops, clearly labeled with his mother’s name and the directions for her to take the drops orally for congestion, which is standard practice for hospice patients. Atropine is normally used to dilate the eye for eye exams, but we use it to dry up excessive secretions when people are dying. Knowing that there wouldn’t be any permanent damage to Mark’s eye, I burst out laughing before I gave him the lecture about never using someone else’s medications. I then went on to explain that his pupil would eventually go back to the normal size but it would probably take several days and he’d need to wear the sunglasses until then. Relieved, he finally smiled a sheepish grin. When I visited the next week, his pupil had indeed returned to normal size.

Several times during the months Mark cared for his mom, I wrote letters to the Judge in Alaska to whom he was supposed to report during his parole, telling him about what a good job Mark was doing and how much he was needed in California. I never heard back from the Judge, but he didn’t order Mark back to Alaska, so apparently my letters worked. I wonder now where Mark is and how his life is going. He was truly a special person hidden behind a burly, and pretty intimidating façade. This big grizzly bear man was really a teddy bear underneath.

Searching for my muse

I ran across this logo from Night Owl Romance. They reviewed my ebook, LET THEM EAT CAKE, and chose it as a top pick. My muse was around then.

During my writing hiatus, I've decided to work full time at my other job as a hospice RN. When I began writing, my plan was to replace nursing with writing. I thought I'd be there by now. Maybe I'm not supposed to replace nursing with anything. Maybe I'm supposed to continue my work as a hospice nurse. I did have a good week last week despite the man that chose to misplace his anger at his wife's illness and take it out on me. Boy did he bend my ear! Oh well, the rest of the folks I saw benefitted from my visits. 1 bad one out of 20 isn't so bad.

Back to finding my muse...my thoughts are turning to historical California. I recently finished a book, CALIFORNIA WOMAN by Donald Knapp, and it was full of history about California. It was such fun to read because I've been to all the places he wrote about. I'm especially drawn to Northern California where my mom lives, near Chico. I guess I'll do some more research and see if my muse finds me.

Enough thoughts for today. I'm going out to float on the pool and meditate.