I was intending to write about hospice nursing, as it has been a while. And gangrene has been on my mind (this will be explored later, don’t go away). But I also wanted to mention something about how when you are single and live sort of alone - that is, alone with a teenager - you can fail to notice basic things that might be pointed out to you by a loving partner if you had one.
I am thinking specifically of slippers. Yesterday, I threw out my slippers. I’ve had them for years. So many years that I was having real difficulty walking around in them because the soles were flapping off both of them. But I’m from thrifty Irish stock, and slippers are not really things you just go out and buy yourself. They are things that you get for Christmas from a family member, sometimes even a spouse, and then sit around feeling devastated because all the love of your life can think of to buy you for Christmas is slippers.
So it was kind of tricky for me to get to the point of throwing them out. And yet the moment I took them off my feet and stuffed them in my trashcan was an extremely liberating one. It was a moment that said Hey Sara! If your slippers are so old they are preventing you from walking around like a normal person, you can just throw them out! I actually laughed out loud. Alone in my home. Please don’t mention this to anyone.
The thing is, now my feet are cold and I have no slippers. I know they can be purchased new for ten bucks in CVS but, you know, there are many other things I could do with that money. I could slip it in the red plastic bucket of the Salvation Army guy who plaintively rings his bell outside United Markets. Or I could get two pints of Haagen Dazs.
That is probably more than adequate on the slippers topic. Still, we also have gangrene to talk about. Lucky!
Gangrene is on my mind (not literally, ew!) because of something that occurred recently in my work as a hospice nurse. I don’t want to gross you out with the details. You could be eating your dinner as you read this. But it got me thinking about the times I have dealt with awful wounds in my patient population. I had friends over to dinner the other night, and since rotting flesh was in my thoughts, I naturally brought it up in the course of conversation. Not during dinner, that would be abnormal, but when we were sitting around having our post-prandial tea and coffee, I happened to mention some wound care I had been doing for a patient’s gangrenous foot and my friends, who were both sitting opposite me on my couch, sort of blanched and held on visibly tighter to their teacups and one of them said in a sort of high voice, do you see that a lot?
It was at that moment that I realized afresh: you are not normal! hospice nurses, hospice workers in general? None of you are normal! I had this realization, which I have had before in my life a few times, and so I quickly pulled it together. I apologized for introducing such an unsavory topic during our after-dinner tranquillity. And then I could not help myself and I added somewhat excitedly yes! I see it sometimes! Quite a bit! More than you might think!
And this was in spite of the fact that I had no idea how much they might think I would see gangrene.
Then I launched into a description of a leg I had once taken care of. My friends hung onto their mugs a little tighter and their expressions said please stop but I did not because I am a hospice nurse and I lose all social perspective when I think about gross wounds. Then one of my friends asked me whether gangrenous flesh has a particular odor. Since they actually asked this, in real life, on my couch, I feel like it’s my duty to answer the question in my blog. And the answer is hell yes. Furthermore, although I have tried to think of a way to describe the odor, I cannot find any way to do it. Most things you smell in life, you can describe them to friends by starting a sentence with “it’s like...” But the smell of gangrene is not like anything else. It is just like itself.
My real purpose in mentioning all of this is to say that whenever I take care of someone with terrible wounds, it just makes me feel how hugely lucky that it’s not me with the wounds. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is sacred work, to care for the dying, for people whose bodies are just worn out with the business of living. And when awful things happen to the body as it exits this world, hospice nurses need to just deal, and take the best care of it they can, and feel grateful for their own health.
As I told my friends, I have seen some things you would not describe to your dinner companions. Uh-huh, they said. And the way I deal, I told them, is that I just sort of power through it, as though everything I am seeing is completely normal. Because otherwise you can freak the patient out. But when I come out of those visits, I sometimes sit in my car and I say out loud That was NOT NORMAL! Sometimes expletives are involved in my expression of how abnormal what I just saw was. Then I put on loud music and drive too fast on the freeway. Large amounts of coffee are usually also involved.
At our weekly team meeting, we get to process some of the things we have seen during the week. Not just the deaths, but the weird wounds, the fungating tumors, and the challenging family members. I will say that I have never been reduced to tears by a wound. But phonecalls with family members have left me shaking and crying in my car. Dressing a necrotic leg has never led me to second guess my chosen career, but angry hurting people have.
But to get back to the slippers, I am feeling better about not having any. Because I could not walk in them, and because tonight I met my good friend at the gym, and she had been home all day and she was wearing not just a pair of slippers, but a mismatched pair. And they were both left feet. So it made me feel really functional and on top of my game, because even though I have no slippers, I was wearing matching footwear. Friends can be helpful that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment