Nursing
by Kay—Age 69—Sewell, NJ
What had possessed me to think I wanted to be a nurse? I was eighteen years old, filling a washbasin and crying at the sink in the eight bed women’s ward. I was dressed in my blue and white stripped uniform, white stockings and oxfords. The starched cap worn by nursing students was bobby pinned to my hair.
I had just met my first patient. I introduced myself and told her I was going to help her get bathed and make her bed. She was a tiny, wrinkled woman with sparse white hair and milky blue eyes. Her arms were folded across her chest, her lips tight and unsmiling. She looked at me but did not speak. I forced a smile and said she would feel better after a bath. She just stared.
I took the flannel bath blanket from the bedside table and placed it over the bedspread. As I pulled the covers from beneath the bath blanket bits of cold scrambled egg fell on the floor. A penetrating, foul odor, which I soon learned was the odor of gangrene, hung in the air. Dark urine drained through a plastic tube into a bottle on the floor.
This was not like our lessons in the Nursing Arts Lab where students practiced giving bed baths to each other. We learned the proper temperature of the water, how to hold the washcloth, how to drape the bath blanket to maintain modesty and prevent chilling, how to give back rubs and how to change bed linens with the patient in bed.
I could not run. I could not fail the patient or myself. I wiped my tears on my sleeves and carried the basin filled with warm water back to my patient.
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