The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story

by Christie Watson

dreamed of doing photography for the National Geographic,

She is ME

ate my vegetarian dinner on the stairs in protest, saying, “It’s me or the chick. I cannot be associated with murder.”

Lol kelsey

drachma;

chewing gum that I had retrieved from underneath a desk, and which had been in the mouth of a boy I liked;

EW

didn’t understand then that I wanted to live many lives, to experience different ways of living.

both nursing and writing are about stepping into other shoes all the time.

looking after adults with severe physical disabilities: helping them to toilet, eat and dress. It was the first time I felt as if I was doing something worthwhile.

the endless friends with sore throats whose necks I would gently press with my fingertips, as if on a clarinet. “Lymph node.”

nurses should be sympathetic toward everyone.

No more career choice changes and flitting around; I would become a nurse. Plus, I knew there would be parties.

lol wat

was terrified of failure; of the look on my parents’ faces when I announced yet another change of heart.

I knew I’d be classroom-based for a while at least, so I wouldn’t kill anyone by accident, or have to wash an old man’s penis or experience similar horrors.

1994,

Twenty years in nursing has taken so much from me, but has given me back even more.

We are all nurses.

But there are other people like me heading to the hospital: a uniform of scuffed flat shoes, rucksack, pale face, bad posture.

rheumy

Bleeding esophageal varices, as a result of cirrhosis of the liver, is one of the most distressing things I’ve ever seen—the

unmarried matrons in the profession, some of whom were living in Spencer House nurses’ home, a place we referred to as “Spinster House,” as we failed to imagine how much of a person good nursing requires.

The nurse sitting on the floor will not be reporting the hours that she spends today being hit. She’ll sit with the patient and will not judge, and she will ignore a couple of bruises.

Sometimes a very low—rather than very high—temperature in elderly patients can indicate sepsis: a life-threatening infection.

bear-hugger.

Behr!

Paracetamol

Betty is not sick; she does not have thickened arteries, requiring surgery and drugs and technology. But she does need something. Something nurses can give.

Sweet tea can prevent seizure, coma, even death, and people’s blood sugar drops in response to serious illness, grief or shock more often than you would imagine.

But I stay another minute, and close my eyes for a while and listen. Betty has a wonderful story. And if I listen hard enough, I stop seeing a frail old woman alone on a hospital trolley, and instead watch a young woman in a dress made from parachute silk, dancing with her new husband, Stan.

:') are these moments what we're meant to hold onto?

I can’t imagine now how I managed to perform such intimate tasks without embarrassment on both sides. Anthony is severely physically disabled and mentally unwell, and some days are harder than others. But I’ve never met anyone else I’ve cared for who could make me laugh until drops of tea fall out of my nostrils. I mean, who needs thirty fucking mopeds?

I like the idea that I can help provide meaning to another person’s life, and during the same process search for meaning in my own. But I have no idea how to go about it.

No horror, obviously. Or aliens. Especially now Derek is back. He believes he’s been abducted and had his kidneys removed by extraterrestrials.” She shakes her head. “Never tell him he’s wrong. I mean, who are we to say that aliens didn’t abduct him?

Lol Connor

the Filipino nurses tell me they are far less likely to be attacked than their male nurse counterparts. “The patients don’t feel so threatened, so they are not afraid. And much of the illness is driven by fear.

“Poor Derek. He’s been attacked repeatedly in the community. It’s the mentally ill who are in danger from society. Not the other way around.”

It is widely regarded as some kind of emotional protection for nurses who are paying the cost of caring for vulnerable people, and it helps the nurse to understand her own personality, life story and memories and how they influence events.

“Keeping a reflective journal helps me stay well,” Sue says, “and on difficult days I still do it. And you will see how far you’re coming, as you move through your placements.

He teaches me about Frida Kahlo, quoting her regularly: “ ‘They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.’ ” “She understood, you know?” Derek says to me. “I mean, she really understood reality? ‘I’m not painting dreams.’ Do you understand?”

“I’d rather have cancer than a serious mental illness.”

Me too

There is no greater expression of pain than a person who eats so little they may die. Or eats so much they may die. Obesity is self-harm. Addiction is self-harm. We hurt ourselves in different ways to express such emotional pain.

“Frida Kahlo killed herself aged forty-seven,” Derek says. “Everyone said it was a blood clot in her lung, but it was an overdose.”

“Do you ever think of it?” she asks. “Suicide?” He narrows his eyes. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Derek’s face is full of fear. I want to scoop him up somehow. To wrap him in a blanket and keep him safe.

The requirements for midwives in the past now seem pretty offensive. John Maubray wrote in The Female Physician of 1724: “She ought not to be too fat or gross, but especially not to have thick or fleshy hands and arms, or large-bon’d wrists…”

She has ironed a fold in the short sleeves of her top, sharp and perfect. Her face is perfectly made-up and she does not have a hair out of place.

Honestly I can't fucking stand tight asses like this. God bless Sara Sonstroem who "doesn't believe in ironing."

Some of my women look fragile enough that they will break, and they pop a baby out like shelling a pea. Others look as tough as nails, and end up going down a pathway of medicalization: drugs, epidural, forceps, C-section. You can’t tell.”

“More likely to tear. Thin skin,” Frances later tells me.

Define thin skin please

“Look for clear bubbles on the outside,” she says. “Can be a sign of gestational diabetes, or congenital hearts.”

I look at the gelatinous substance and try not to gag. “It looks like the inside of a pork pie,” I say. “Quite,” she replies, not smiling.

The human placenta lacks the enzyme CYP17, which stimulates labor in animals. Labor in humans is more of a language—a language between mother and baby, translated by the placenta,

“Birth holds the hand of death,” she tells me. “We begin and we end at the same time.”

Human babies, along with dolphins, otters and some seabirds (including penguins), have a diver’s reflex until they’re six months old. It is the kind of reflex that overrides other reflexes, allowing a baby to stay underwater for longer than usual without drowning. Our connection to nature, our will to survive.

“Think of it like an orchestra,” a doctor tells me. “The flutes are playing one thing, the cellos another, and nobody is listening to anyone. The music sounds terrible. Interventions like adenosine or synchronized cardioversion are the conductor raising the baton. There are a few seconds of silence, before everybody begins to play again, in time and in tune.”

I look after a baby with stiff lungs (pulmonary hypertension), as the heart has been pumping too hard, and for too long, with a valve that doesn’t work and a hole in the center. She will not self-oxygenate and needs to go onto nitric oxide in order to live. Nitric oxide is not to be confused with the nitrous oxide that my midwife friends and I were inhaling. Nitric oxide, which is used regularly in neonatal, child and adult Intensive-Care Units in the high-oxygen-rich environment of the ventilation circuit, has the dangerous potential to convert to cytotoxic nitrogen oxide—the same gas that was produced by nuclear tests and was responsible for the reddish color in mushroom clouds.