It was new and it was old, the trip to the hospital.
I went to see a lady I didn’t know. And what a charmer she was! She managed, despite her difficulty breathing, to entertain a stranger seemingly as effortlessly as if we were meeting in her home.
Almost….
Look, a hospital robs you of many things—usually starting with your dignity.
Which may be why I called her by the honorific “Mrs.” Everybody else, I’m sure, was calling her by her first name. But we chatted, she and I, and though she had no idea who I was, she carried on gamely.
Brought back memories. I spent a decade as a nurse, in a hospital that was virtually identical to the one I visited yesterday.
What struck me the most?
Oddly, the handrails on the walls. But there were familiar sights everywhere—the glassed-in nurses’ station, the waddling nursing assistants, the covered dinner trays.
I remembered the feeling of being in a hospital, and of being a nurse. Oddly, I have no particular memories of those days?
Why?
It may be the curious effect of depression on memory. Some people hypothesize that depression and especially anxiety hinder the ability to retain memory. I can recall bits of that past, but not much. I know that a lot happened, much of which should have been, and was, memorable. But it’s not there.
Wait—a patient. Manic as hell, and completely out of control. Admitted pregnant, by another patient, who was even worse. It was a nightmare—virtually no drugs could be given to her, because she was pregnant. And so she shredded the unit into chaos, and there was nothing anyone could do.
The doctors, of course, came and went. But it was eight hours of sheer hell for the nurses. The patients got the worst of it—24 hours. Well, no, 22 hours—the patient was sleeping only 2 hours a night, and that intermittently.
So the nurses were howling. One—what were we going to do about that unborn child? Sorry, but it was the clearest possible choice for an abortion. The gene pool was a disaster. And the parenting skills / home environment were even worse.
The problem, of course, was consent. We were documenting that the patient was running naked down the halls screaming that Jesus was humping her. Could we then turn around and attest that she had knowingly consented to an abortion?
It went on for weeks. There was pre-hell—the hours before your shift when you counted the minutes before you had to go in there. There was the hell itself. And post-hell, which generally meant several strong drinks and bed.
News alert to doctors—fetuses grow.
So there she was in her second trimester. Still untreated, still crazy. We knew, those of us aware of the past, what Bedlam must have been. Except that instead of one untreated crazy, Bedlam had a ward-full.
Somebody screamed loud enough, or perhaps long enough. Social services looked for some family member who could give consent.
Nobody—the patient had exhausted her family.
Eventually, the hospital went to court. Which meant, of course, a delay of some weeks.
The hearing was postponed….
The patient was now of the belief that she was carrying Jesus’ child, which would be the Second Coming. This excited ribald commentary in the staff; I wept.
And I was the nurse to prep her for the abortion that eventually the judge ordered. Oh, and to give her the medicines that would finally, finally sedate her.
“When Thorazine first came out, it was in a container about the size of a gallon of water. Had a little pump on it, and you were supposed to put precisely 100 or 150mg of the stuff in a glass of orange juice. Well, I did for a while. Then, I just started to take a look at the patient. If he was really crazy, I’d just pump away like hell!”
The words of an older nurse. And one I respected. So of course I topped up the pregnant patient’s drink, as it were, and put her on the gurney. We went down to surgery together. I signed off, another nurse took over.
You’ll have guessed what happened.
The abortion was performed, and the child was…
…born alive.
Which meant, of course, that a code had to be called, and every effort made to save the life of this poor child.
I left nursing soon after that.
Oh—and is that the reason I remember so little?
