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Nineteen Steps

Priscilla Mainardi December 28, 2012 No Comments

Priscilla Mainardi

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.

Mrs. Napoli has eight pills. She has trouble swallowing them, so I circle the unit to find the pill crusher, stopping again at the pantry for applesauce to mix them up in.

Mrs. Napoli is a wisp of an old woman, light enough for a strong wind to blow over. Her wide blue eyes,

Missing Piece

Ray Bingham December 7, 2012 No Comments

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.

The Silent Treatment

Frances Smalkowski March 2, 2012 1 Comment

Frances Smalkowski

Last year, while enjoying a two-week tour of the cultural capitals of China, I was amazed by how at home I felt. Searching my memory for the reasons behind this unexpected state of mind, I suddenly remembered Mr. Loy.

We met more than forty years ago. I was in my third year as a nursing student, doing a semester-long rotation in a large psychiatric hospital. Each student was assigned a patient for the semester, and Mr. Loy was mine.

We were expected to forge a therapeutic relationship with our patients. This was a tall order; most of our patients were diagnosed with some form of persistent schizophrenia, and few spoke in any coherent fashion, if they spoke at all.

Mr. Loy was no

Soon

Stacy Nigliazzo January 27, 2012 1 Comment

“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.

Witnessing Consent for an Autopsy

Patty Bertheaud Summerhays December 2, 2011 No Comments

Patty Bertheaud Summerhays

“They just cut the abdomen like an operation, look in and sew him up. No one will know.”

I know the inside story–the body parts,
the heart, brain, liver, lungs,
kidney, spleen, bowel, and bladder
sliced on a cutting board
like loaves of bread.
The coroner donning a butcher’s apron
splattered with blood from the last
scrape of blade over bone,
slipping off the scalp like a mask.
The eyes stopping him
like the end of sentences until
he doesn’t feel the frown of brow–
anger as he drills to its roots.

Emotions leaving both men
with a grasp of brain.

A slice of brain placed in formaldehyde
jiggles like a thought trying to collect its thoughts.

Every organ shredded and a

Hospital Corners

Eileen Valinoti August 12, 2011 1 Comment

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

Through a Hollow Tube

Jan Jahner July 29, 2011 No Comments

Jan Jahner

She carries forward the bundle like a giant fish
vacant eyes above wood-smoked plaid bathrobe
hook me as we unwrap his blue stillness
words swim upstream,
I am swallowed by a wave, standing by admissions, heading out to sea.

I left mine on the rug by her sister, curled in cartoons.
Room Four has a gurney and a chair
Stained, nail-bitten fingers slide through silky dark hair
She starts again, how the cabin was cold, how she wrapped him up tight
how he should be hungry, mine holds her bottle now.

One year out from nursing school in Adrenaline Heights
with minimal scales, I sink to the ocean bottom
dark in boulders and rust.
She starts again, how the cabin was cold, how she wrapped

Morphine, Pearl Harbor

Ann Neuser Lederer December 10, 2010 No Comments

Ann Neuser Lederer

They do not scream. They keep their hands steady as they shoot the shots.
They run from one to the next, on their rounds without walls.
The troops of well trained girls patrol the troops, their wards.

And they make them to inhale their brew
of Friar’s Balsam, tincture of tree resin:
Pines and cooling mountain breezes in the steaming, smoke filled chaos.
Pliable amber beads, shrines for prehistoric bees,
crumbs for tuneful fiddles lull like opium beds
on the dark, explosive rocks

And though they run around, the nurses are careful.

They inscribe the letter M on the foreheads of those they have dosed,
They make their gentle mark on foreheads doomed or wounded,
under dust and thunder.

About the poet:

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Semi-Private Room

Jan Jahner November 19, 2010 No Comments

Jan Jahner

Sometimes nectar appears
when stories intersect:

I walk into the room
rearrange the bed-table
and push the pole with its bulging bladder sideways
for a closer look.

Her thinness triples the size of the bed
but her father, with his anxious chatter
feels strangely like my own
and her resolve, that tense control
has a familiar edge.

It feels like all the calories she’s ever counted
and all the sweet things resisted for the last eleven years
have aligned as a taut shield
protecting that juicy place that hasn’t ripened,
urged too early to carry her family through chaos:
after all, her mother was dying of cancer
after all, mine couldn’t manage mental illness
after all, aren’t fathers helpless in these things?

The

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: nursing

Nineteen Steps

Missing Piece

The Silent Treatment

Soon

Witnessing Consent for an Autopsy

Hospital Corners

Through a Hollow Tube

Morphine, Pearl Harbor

Semi-Private Room

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: nursing

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