riotheclown

November 17, 2010

Title: Hanging by a thread.

prompt: I’m with you.  Thanks to lj community: All_unwritten 

In 1989 most hospitals had not come around to the idea of comfort. The way of thinking, a continuance of 19^th century understanding of germs, was that anything but resilient surfaces that were easy to clean were germ factories. The sick were germ factories or germ receptors and so were held in as clean a form of isolation as possible. Walking through the halls of a hospital even the softest step seemed to click. Walking towards yet another painful test or procedure, the walls stood like disinterested guards at the gallows.

 The only comfort was the nurses.

 In 1990 I had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. I was scheduled for a “Lymphangyogram” for some reason the Saturday Night Live skit with a shark pretending to be delivering a “Candygram” comes to mind. 

 A very tiny amount of dye was to be injected by machine very slowly into the tiny little conduits of my immune system. They were to make incisions into my feet and sew thread like tubes to the little veins (arteries?). It was a painstaking procedure. I had to be strapped down to the table so I would not move. My feet had to be frozen. 

Despite the heavy restraints I got the shakes and they were interfering with the surgeon’s ability to attach the tiny threads. In general he was not having a good day. He swore frequently. He was starting to hate my feet I could tell. 

 I have a horribly pathetic habit of apologizing to people when they are hurting me. I think this annoyed him even more. (It usually does, as I said, it is a really horribly pathetic habit as well as useless.)

 He complained, “She won’t lie still. Give her an Ativan.” He might have said Valium. (These days the wonderful drug is Ativan.) 

 He said it to the nurse who was standing by my side the whole time. As soon as I took it I noticed this nurse who had been holding my hand. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Of course this can’t be true but it was what I thought at the time. Suddenly I was filled with love for everyone, even the doctor.

 “Are you having a bad day?” I asked him. 

 My lovely nurse bent over and whispered to me, “Give him hell! I’m with you.”

 “Maybe you should count to ten, or go for a walk and come back, I know, get a coffee!” I was on a roll.

 My nurse winked at me.

 As it turned out he never did get me hooked up on the left foot. I had a reaction to the dye and it blew out the veins on my calves. Infection set in and when I went to have the stitches removed it was so horrible and frightening I ended up pulling them out myself, in pity for my G.P. who was suddenly pale. I have pale scars on that foot, where incision after incision the doctor had attempted to find a vein without success. The x-rays therefore were pretty much useless. I don’t know if I cared. I remember it as one of the truly horrendous experiences of my cancer nightmare.

 At the time the provincial government had not yet cut back funding and hospitals had not yet cut back on nurses, not yet. I was lucky to have an angel of mercy beside me to whisper, “I’m with you.”

 In the last 25 years the technology has improved but nursing has been fractured by cut backs. When I took my mother to St. Michaels Hospital for eye surgery recently there was a wonderful waiting room done up like Christmas but patients walked into surgery pulling their own I.V.s without a nurse, or a word or hand held until they were served up.

 I know that it is expensive to run hospitals. I know that funding is for equipment and that concern for the comfort of patients is expressed in homey little touches that make hospitals look like ski chalets and that is all well intentioned, but I can’t help but think that cutting back on nurses twenty years ago derailed the quality of care in Ontario.

 Bureaucracies are always lumbering fools, they need constraints and an Ombudsman to keep watch for flagrant waste, but when we elect those who advocate the striping of funds to those institutions that express our better natures, we tell our own hearts, that in our hour of need, there will be no one who will be there to say, “I am with you.”