The other day I visited some patients for another nurse. This happens at hospice: sometimes one nurse will be in a frenzy of overwhelm and another will be tra-la-la-ing about. So they ask tra-la-la nurse to go visit patients for frenzied nurse. Usually, it’s really routine visits that frenzied nurse knows won’t make tra-la-la nurse hate her forever.
Thus I was assigned two patients off my usual route. The first had a name so Italian it provoked my really bad fake Italian accent that I do not seem to be able to help adopting when I get patients with very Italian names. Do not wahree, Carmella (not her real name), I intoned in my extremely fake Italian accent as I drove through the unfamiliar streets to her house, I am comming. Ccchhhelp is on thee wiyyy.
One of the issues with seeing other nurses’ patients is that, while their regular nurse knows exactly how to find their really hard-to-find house, you do not. Nurses often add helpful directions in the patient’s chart, but sometimes, well, they’re just not helpful enough. Carmella lived in a little apartment down an alleyway off the main road. Her nurse had added directions: Best to park on the street, walk down the alley, and her apartment is on the.
On the what? I parked on the street. I walked down the alley, muttering under my breath about having to walk down dark alleys in crappy parts of towns I don’t know as part of my job. I got to the end of the alley. There were six doors to apartments. I took out my computer, balancing it on a snowy staircase to log into our charting system and see if I had misremembered the directions. Nope. Walk down the alley, they said, and her apartment is on the.
I picked the most together-looking doorway, employing the principle that it looked the least likely to house gun-toting trumpies who might be enraged by a hospice nurse ringing their doorbell on a random morning. A little old gentleman answered the door. I told him who I was looking for. He looked confused and frightened. I showed him my hospice badge. Look, I’m not a gun-toting trumpie come to shoot you for stealing the election! He motioned me inside. I made a mental note to add right to the directions.
After that visit, I had to cross the Mid Hudson Bridge to an emergency that turned out not to be an emergency after all. This almost never happens at hospice when you have really anxious people who are totally stressed by the impending death of their loved one and think that someone giving a tiny moan when they wake up is an emergency. I’m not being judgie here. I was okay switching up my day, crossing the Hudson and driving through a worsening snowstorm to this emergency. Okay, maybe a tiny bit judgie.
Then I headed back over the bridge to see another patient for frenzied nurse. This visit was a breeze, except the caregiver made me wear shoe booties in the house, and there were hardwood floors. Shoe booties and hardwood floors do not really make for a dignified hospice nurse visit. Sliding around a little, I did my best with the patient and made my exit into a very snowy world. Be safe out there! the caregiver said, as I picked my way gingerly down her snow-covered stairs. You too! I called, acutely aware that even to my unpracticed eye, the snow flurries that had been forecast looked more like a serious snowfall.
On the way home, I played music that I turned up ever louder as the roads got snowier. Where were the plows? Usually as soon as the snow starts the plows and salters are thrumming dramatically up and down our roads immediately making the world safe for individuals like me who have no idea how to drive in snow. But the snow kept falling and I was not encountering any reassuring vehicles with giant metal scoops on the front. My driving speed deteriorated to a meager 20 miles per hour and I still felt like I was driving in three inches of compacted snow. Because I was.
Then I encountered the hill on Hollow Road down to where our house is. I started out great. 20mph at the top of a hill. What could go wrong? Halfway down, I tried the brakes. My trusty Subaru immediately started to fishtail. I tapped the brakes, like I’d been told to do by so many snow aficionados in the past six months. Unless you have experienced it, there’s no way to know what swearwords will come out of your mouth as your 4-wheel drive fishtails on a hill in compacted snow. I’m Irish, and even I was impressed.
But the tap-tap-tap braking worked and I made it home without ditch-diving or smashing into any oncoming vehicles. Nor did I slide across the 4-way-stop at Center and Hollow where three other vehicles were waiting their turn. I didn’t even really move into the other lane. Much. At all. As I slid to a slippery park in our driveway, I was acutely aware that I had purchased a bottle of old vine Zinfandel to have with the salmon I planned to cook for dinner. Could be dinnertime would happen really early tonight.
Turned out, I was right. The kids came up to the cabin at 4:30 because their mom and dad were busy. Forget the salmon, we had a hearty meal of mac’n’cheese, sausages and a couple of stray tomatoes for the health aspect. After a few games of tractors-meet-dinosaurs (Aron) and dressup-in-lace-and-fur-and-velvet (Elisah), we went back down to their house because Aron was no longer wearing a diaper and there’s only so long that this situation can be a tenable one with a two-year-old.
We snuggled on their couch and Elisah asked me in her intensely animated fashion D’you want me to tell you about the most special amazing magical world that I’ve invented? I thought back on my snowy fishtailing experience just a couple of hours before, my near miss with a ditch-dive, my chilly brush with death. And I told her fervently that yes, indeed I did.
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