Going South ... continued

Mrs. M. lay with her glittering black eyes open most of the night. Although she was blanket-bathed daily, she gave off the brownish smell of a body steeped in medicines. She was voiceless, because of the tracheotomy, and would click her tongue to attract attention. Then she would mouth her instructions: Move my hips to the right – no, not so far. Scratch my neck. Suction me, deeper, deeper, deeper!

Figuring out what she wanted was tough, till you learned how to lip read. We spent twenty minutes one night on Close the toilet door. When I finally figured out it was creating a draft, and closed it, she fell asleep immediately. I had no conception of her what her life must be like. I had no idea then of the awfulness of it, the daily mental and physical agony, and I was too terrified to think about it. What if something went wrong on my shift? What if she reported me to Night Sister? What if she died on me? Somehow my lack of empathy made it easier to care for her, and she liked me for it. She didn't want my sympathy, she just wanted me to make her comfortable and not patronize her. Once she even smiled, although when I told my friends, nobody would believe me.

When I finished my shift, I was so relieved I would put her immediately out of my mind. But over the years, her memory has come back, again and again: The book stand and electronic page-turner, tongue operated, that her engineer husband made for her. The way her hot, dimly lit world was circumscribed by the yellow spread of light from her reading lamp. The rage in her black eyes.

Although I got into it by default, and night pool aside, I loved the job, loved hurrying about in my starched white uniform wearing my Flying Nun hat folded down as small as possible. Hell, I didn't even really mind burning the shit out of myself on the steam from the sterilizer as I unloaded hot bedpans and stacked them in the sluice room. It was interesting, learning all about people's diseases and operations, and in spite of all the criticism by nurses higher up the totem pole, I knew I was good at it. The patients told me so.

© 2000 Trout &
Kerry Wilke