After fifteen years as a physical therapist in the long-term care industry, I’d vowed never again to get overly attached to a resident. Although I accepted my patients’ inevitable physical and cognitive declines, the deaths of those I had cherished took too much of an emotional toll: It felt like losing a grandparent, repeatedly.
Then William entered our facility.
When I met Mr. Rosenbaum, age ninety, I’d been a physical therapist at the hospital for all of three months.
The nurse had propped up his scabbed foot on several pillows. Cushioned on them like a precious jewel, it extended over the bed’s end.
I introduced myself and asked if he’d like help adjusting his yarmulke, which was entangled in the nasal breathing tube slung around his left ear. He smiled at me, one eye wider than the other. I grinned back, reminded of my own grandpa.
“Are you married?” he asked.
I knock on the partly open door and peek around the curtain. A grainy yellow light above the hospital bed falls on a frail, trembling woman as she struggles to comb her wet grey hair.
“Margaret?” I say quietly.
She does not hear me over the hiss of the supplemental oxygen. I watch her for a moment longer.
I was twenty-eight when I first walked into Matthew’s room in the neurosurgery ward at the university medical center. A newly graduated physical therapist, I was working at my first job in the field. I was there to evaluate Matthew for physical therapy, and I had all the right gear–a white lab coat, running shoes, a stethoscope, a clipboard and a goniometer (an instrument that measures joint angles)–and an enthusiastic desire to help this young man function normally.
© 2024 Pulse - Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Inc. All rights reserved.
