Telling the Truth

After a long night, the frigid morning air slapped me awake as I walked out of the hospital from just attending a delivery. Once home, I decided I had enough energy to do a “high intensity” workout and signed myself up to go in an hour.

I made myself a strong cup of coffee and changed into my gym clothes, pretending I was just starting a new day. Back into the cold with the coffee lingering on my breath, I headed out again.

She appeared suddenly in the doorway and hissed, “You’re very rude!” 

With her words echoing around the darkened room, the evening nurse stomped off the ward as I went back to assessing my patient.

It was 1966. As a third-year nursing student assigned to the night shift, I shared responsibility for a twenty-bed unit with a nurse’s aide. The evening nurse and I had just finished the two time-honored traditions that occurred with the change of shifts: patient report and counting narcotics. 

“Yea, that was crazy –,” I caught myself and glanced nervously at the resident, hoping I hadn’t committed a classic medical student-gaffe.

He responded diplomatically, something about having made the right call for the situation.

We should have been in the OR hours earlier, at the first sign of fetal distress. Instead, she was left writhing in pain in the labor bed. I wet a cloth for her face and watched the fetal heart rate drop lower and lower. We helped her change position at every deceleration. She cried out with every turn.

I was always truthful with my patients, and I always assumed that they were, too, in return. One family gave me an early, shocking lesson about telling the truth.

Dad’s official death certificate lists “pancreatic cancer” as the cause of his death. His physicians determined this diagnosis after deciding that Dad had insulinoma; they reached this conclusion through a process of elimination after a long series of tests and after examining his symptoms. Specifically, Dad had extremely low blood sugar, causing him to descend into coma-like states where his mind suddenly shut down, his wobbling legs failed to bear his weight and his overall state-of-being deteriorated. The “cure” was to feed him protein and liquids every two-to-three hours, including throughout the night. Dad and I had many deep conversations at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. as he ate his peanut butter sandwich and drank his milk or orange juice.