Tender Mercies
Janet Killackey
About the artist:
“I have always been interested in art. I chose nursing as a vocation, but my interest in art continued to grow, in fits and starts, during my forty-five years in health care. I have worked in many areas of nursing practice and also in many mediums–charcoal, pen and ink, oils, watercolors and now mixed media. I feel that this piece reflects where I am now–merging my life experiences in art and in the practice of nursing, both of which bring a level of comfort and caring to others.”
About the artwork:
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Fateful Encounter
Amy Eileen Hiscock
I cannot take my eyes from his face.
It has been destroyed in the wreck, along with the rest of his body. His head is misshapen, bloodied. Someone has tried to staple together one of the larger lacerations–extending diagonally across his face and under his chin–but there was little point. They gave up partway through.
I have never seen a dead body. I am twenty-five and in the second of five terms of nursing school.
Last Rites
Candice Carnes
In 2002, I was living in Albuquerque and working as a nursing assistant. My staffing agency had assigned me to a medical surgical floor at a hospital in Santa Fe, a fifty-minute drive away.
One day, as I was enjoying the high-desert beauty en route to the hospital, a code was called.
The patient’s name was Sam, as I recall. It could have been anything, but Sam is the name that echoes in my memories of that day.
His heart stopped.
I hadn’t arrived at the hospital yet, but I had been involved in enough codes to know what had been done.
Despite his advanced age, Sam had full-code status with no restrictions, meaning that he or his family had wanted everything
Stardust
Audrey Cortez
Years ago I worked as a registered nurse in a busy surgical pre-admission clinic, preparing patients who’d been scheduled for surgery for the upcoming operation and hospital experience.
My workdays were packed with back-to-back, hour-long appointments. Whatever surgery the patient was facing–oral, orthopedic or anything else–every interview followed the same format. I would greet the patient, who’d often bring along a family member, and quickly escort them both into my small office, seating them in the stiff, outdated plastic chairs facing my desk. On the way, trying to save time, I would explain that as part of the pre-admission process I’d need to do a health interview and a physical assessment, get an accurate list of the patient’s medications, labs, X-rays,
Nineteen Steps
Tuesday morning, eight o’clock, and I have seven things to do. Check vitals, change a dressing, get a patient out of bed, send another to the operating room. Review lab results, give medications, start a blood transfusion.
I have six patients, and they have an average of five morning medications each. I make three trips to the med room for supplies, two trips to the pantry for fresh water.
Missing Piece
Ray Bingham
I entered the hospital by a back door. It was evening. As I walked down the quiet corridors, their cinder-block walls, green paint, tiled floors and soft fluorescent lighting granted me a superficial sense of familiarity: I’d walked these halls countless times over the last five years.
Now, however, I also felt a bit apprehensive. I was not supposed to be here.
Two weeks before, I’d been laid off. It had been the second round of staffing cuts in six months–due, the administrators said, to declining revenues. They made this claim despite the continued high numbers of patients in my unit, the newborn intensive-care unit, or NICU.
Soon
“Wake up, Eli,” I whisper, tapping his collarbone. “I need to re-check your blood pressure.”
“Aw, come on, doll,” he snickers. “A man can’t snore if he’s dead. Ain’t that good enough?”
“No, sir,” I reply. “I need numbers.”
It’s two a.m. I’m seven hours into a sixteen-hour shift in the emergency department of a busy city hospital, running five rooms in the “sick but stable” section with Dr. Watts.
Hospital Corners
Eileen Valinoti
“And now, as we finish up, we’ll need to put our blankets away. I want you to fold them like this,” announced my yoga teacher–a bit sternly, I thought. With swift, deft hands, she began to demonstrate. Something in the tone of her voice and the sharp jut of her chin brought me back to Miss Coyle…
Miss Mary Coyle RN was the nursing arts instructor in my first year of training, more than fifty years ago. She taught our group of thirty–twenty-seven eager eighteen-year-old women and three young nuns–the basic nursing skills: how to give a bed bath; administer an injection; prepare hot and cold compresses, etc.
Twice a week, my classmates and I filed into her classroom, which was set up
The Cruelest Month
Ray Bingham
One day in April, I took the assignment none of the other nurses wanted: Baby Michael. A hopeless case.
Born almost four months premature, weighing barely a pound, he was now all of six days old. His entire body wasn’t much longer than my open hand. As he lay motionless on a warming bed with the ventilator breathing for him, the night nurse gave me report: serious intestinal infection, bowel surgery, septic shock, multiple antibiotics, infusions to support his failing heart, transfusions to replace the serous drainage seeping from the surgical incision on his darkened, swollen belly.
“Take good care of him,” she finished. “He’s been through so much already.”
As experienced nurses, we both knew that a premature infant rarely survives so
Coming Full Circle
Stacy Nigliazzo
Only thirty minutes into my evening ER nursing shift, and I was already behind. My first patient was a pregnant teenager with heavy vaginal bleeding. “About three months, I guess,” she flatly replied when asked about her last period. As we placed her legs in the stirrups for the pelvic exam, torrents of blood and water rolled into the kick bucket on the floor.
Dr. Parkman had barely opened the speculum when we saw it. I knew she couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but she could see mine. Shielding her from my expression, stunned and speechless, I cowered as best I could behind her left knee.
There it was. Tiny, pink and perfect. Her baby’s hand, so small that it would easily fit
Cure
Veneta Masson
In Latin it means care,
conjures priests and temples
the laying on of hands
sacred pilgrimage
sacrifice
the sickbed
invalid and
solemn attendants.
How far we have come.
Today’s English
has neatly expunged
these purely human elements.
Cure is impersonal, consequential
unequivocal, sometimes violent–
the annihilation
of the thing that ails.
This nurse
approaching the patient
has discarded temple garb
for practical scrubs.
His gloved hands
unsheathe the magic bullet,
shoot it through the central line
where it locks onto the target cells.
For the not-yet-cured,
there is still sacred pilgrimage–
that dogged slog
to the high tech shrine,
the health food store,
the finish line of the annual race
where, etched on each undaunted face,
is a gritty tale of survival.
About
The Women of Victoria Ward
Muriel Murch
I remember
The women of Victoria Ward.
The laughter of Liz,
before there were good prostheses
before falsies
left, right or bilateral
were built into the cup size of your choice.
Pacing the corridors
and knitting.
Ready to go home.
Building her strength
with a strand of yarn
Tumbled upwards from the empty cup
against that scarlet scar
beneath the bodice
of her bright summer dress.
I remember
Winnie’s eyes
watching feces pour
in a torrent
down her abdomen
searing her flesh
until I bathed her body
changed the bed
and wiped away
her tears.
We named that
foolish pink protuberance
her own John Thomas.
Her slow, shy smile
heralded victory
for the moment.
About the poet:
Muriel Murch (//livinglit@earthlink.net/“>livinglit@earthlink.net)