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Story Forum Index -> General Fiction

The Patient

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lavinla



Joined: 14 May 2008
Posts: 10
The Patient

I thought my day had been going well until I saw the dark woman in the hall. I’d been coming out of the clean utility room, a thermometer in hand when I saw the dark woman. Frozen in the doorway, all I could do was watch the patient taking small slow steps, pushing an IV pole that also acted as her crutch.

I couldn’t see her face, just her back. She was bundled in a pink bathrobe, adding extra mass to her skeletal body. Her bald head was covered with a thick purple fleece cap, but the nape of her neck was exposed. The darkness of that part of her skin fought the soft pink of her bathrobe. By the way she was walking, waddling, negotiating her steps; I knew the woman’s abdomen was distended.

A nurse was walking beside the dark woman, talking to her, but the roar of blood in my ears drowned out any other noise. The nurse and the dark woman disappeared into the patient’s room. Realizing I hadn’t been breathing, I inhaled deeply. Oxygen once again my reaching my brain broke my trance. I blinked, and my eyes refocused on the now empty hospital hallway. As I left the doorway, stepping into the hall, I decided I had just imagined the dark woman. Maybe she was just an apparition of a departed soul. This possibility scared me less than the possibility that it was a real patient.

Reaching the nursing station, I placed the thermometer on the counter, and felt someone touch my back.

“I have an IV line that you can prep,” says my buddy nurse.

“Oh, good,” I say, “Should I get my teacher?”

“No,” she answers, “Prep this one as a practice run and when we hang her second med you can get your teacher then.”

“Ok,” I agree.

“So I was thinking that we can do the whole procedure, from signing to priming. What do you think?” she asks as we start walking towards the patients’ room.

“Oh, that’s great,” I answer.

Outside the patients’ room the nurse hands me the patient’s medication profile. It’s like a map, trying to figure out the best route to comfort and health. The names of the medications have beautiful, exotic names. Adryamicin… makes me think of Cleopatra’s Alexandria. As my eyes scan down the list, I count what I’ll need, and pull syringes, needles, saline, tubing, gauze, tape and gloves out of the stock cabinet beside me. As I open packages, I’m calmed by the smell of sterile plastic. It’s transfixing to watch needles pierce vials, sucking crystal clear liquid into the tube of the syringe. My hands gliding from vials, to alcohol swabs, to saline bags seem to be dancing their own silent ballet. I do everything silently. I calculate the formula for drip rate and the nurse smiles.

“We have pumps that do that for us,” she says, “but it’s good you know how to do it.”

I gather everything in my arms and follow the nurse into the room. There’s a dark haired man sitting in a blue armchair, his back facing me.

“Ok, so I think we’re ready,” said the nurse, “I have a student with me this morning.”

“Oh, you have a little helper,” said the man in the chair.

“What year are you in sweetie?” asked the dark woman.

I didn’t want to look at her. I already knew her eyes were dead. All the patients on this floor were already dead. The only reason they continued to go through the motions was for their families. But on the inside, they were already dead. If you were willing to see it, you could see it in their eyes.

“I’m in second,” I answer not quite looking up.

“Oh, such a nice profession,” the dark woman continues. There’s a sweet melody in her voice. I know I can’t avoid it any longer. Her coffee black eyes are magnets pulling at my eyes.

“Are you enjoying it?” the woman asks.

“It’s a lot of work,” I say honestly, “but I love it.”

I have to look up. To not look up would be disrespectful. But my heart is already crying. When our eyes do lock my heart finishes breaking. She’s just a shell, containing cancer ridden organs. Her body is a battlefield where mutated malignant cells are gradually winning the war. Behind her dark Latin eyes are traces of passion that once must have greeted each sunrise with excitement. Traces that haven’t been eroded yet by the rising waves of physical pain promising death. In the second that our eyes are communicating, there’s a slight flicker. A slow hypnotizing smile caresses her dry lips. My eyes float past hers and land on a framed photo on the nightstand. It’s her, on her wedding day. The beautiful creature captured on film must have been in her twenties. Her skin in this photo only had a hint of cinnamon. I knew the dark tint of her skin now was because of her treatment. Most of the patients on this floor have the same dark hue. It could only be replicated with the toxic chemicals invading their veins.

“Just take every moment of it in,” she says, “Work hard, but have fun while you’re doing it. At the end of the day, when you’re about to fall asleep, make sure you have something from your day you can laugh about.”

“I’m going to get a coffee while they do this,” said the man getting up, “Want something?”

“I wouldn’t mind a breakfast sandwich,” jokes the nurse beside me.

“I’ll see what I can do,” the man answers smiling.

I place everything down at the foot of the bed.

“So, my student is going to set everything up, and I’m going to watch,” the nurse explains.

The woman just smiles at me.

I start to hang mini IV bags on her pole. I snap tubes into ports on her main IV line. Each bag is was labelled by me with medication, dose, rate and patient name and number. The process is slow, but I’m confident. I reset her pump, and the first med starts to flow. I look up at the nurse, and she nods her approval.

There’s still an IV bag left. It’s the biggest of them all. It’s wrapped in a beer bottle brown plastic bag. There’s a label on the bag shouting the words “Hazard – Bio Toxic”. This is the poison disguised as a cure. I don’t even want to touch the bag. Not because I’m afraid of it, but because I hate it.

The nurse must have interpreted my hesitation as confusion.

“Do you know how to hang this one?” she asks me.

“No,” I lie. I thought she would do it for me, but I was wrong.

“Well, first, do you know why it’s wrapped in a second bag?” she quizzes me.

“Because it’s photosensitive,” I answer.

“That’s right.” She nods. “Do you know what it is?”

“That’s her chemo,” the word burns in my mouth.

“Right,” she continues nodding, “So first you’re going to open the bag and make sure it’s the right med. Then, you close it, and hang it. And, that’s it!”

I tear the bag open at the seam. My stomach spasms and cramps when I see the IV bag. The red fruit-punch coloured liquid reminds me of a few drops of blood diluted in a glass of water. I want to throw up. My muscles burn at the thought of this liquid fire mingling with the dark woman’s blood.

Somehow, the bag gets hung, and the line primed. I don’t remember doing it myself, but when I’m in the hall with the nurse, I realize I must have done it because she’s congratulating me on a job well done. She leaves me to finish writing my progress notes. The man has returned and is again sitting in the blue armchair his back turned to me. He’s reading a newspaper. The dark woman is resting with her eyes closed. The peace on her face reminds me of a sleeping baby. In that one moment, the earths’ rotation stopped, paralyzing the present and transporting me to the nightmare of my past. The man in the blue chair was my father, the dark woman my mother. Me, I was standing in the alcove that served as the entrance to two rooms. It was like I was about to step into a painting. The past and the present merging and bleeding into each other on the canvas of my mind.

In that alcove, I wasn’t a student nurse, one of the older students in the class. I was a woman/child, having just taken her first steps into the brutal harsh reality of adulthood. I was the foolish embracer of faith, who tore herself into a hundred pieces to satisfy the demands of others, all the time believing that all the hard work would pay off. I was the girl before the scars on my wrist. The present day me pulled me back. That girl didn’t exist anymore. She tried to kill herself. She didn’t succeed in draining all the blood from her body, but she did bleed out enough to claim her spirit and innocence.

I didn’t see the dark woman again that day. I faked a stomach ache, and asked to go home.

Post Wed May 14, 2008 5:35 am 
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