Nursing Stories

I realize this won’t be for everyone, but I thought I would share a few ‘journal entries’ from the last few weeks. Reader discretion is advised. I will post more regularly in the next few weeks as I process everything.

Thursday: the Surgical Wards

I decide to face the very ward I have dreaded since I first laid eyes on it: surgical.  I tried not to be surprised by the bodies of dedicated family members sleeping under the metal bed frames and the over 85 inhabitants of the ward.  I tried to walk past without startling at the smell of infected wounds, and at the sight of bone dry IV drips and gown-less, sheet-less patients. I tripped past the sleeping women on the outside patio casually and tried not to mind the child peeing on the floor beside his mom’s bed.  The nurse who was guiding me through the war zone was one of the brightest and most passionate I have met in this setting. Eyes on fire she told me straight: we don’t assess patients. As I gulped back my judgements and my privileged ideals, I leaned in closer to hear all that she said after.  “But I do all their dressings, I do my best, I give them what I can.” I see it in her face though, the frustration and despair of changing wound after gaping wound with minimal supplies and having to write ‘out of stock’ on another medication entry. I see the impossibility of the task and the fact that she still shows up at work and begs the blood bank for blood even though they too are  ‘out of stock.’ “At least today we have tylenol,” she grins (as they have had a hospital-wide stock out on tylenol and ibuprofen). 

I follow her lead and do the same, and roll up my sleeves.  I unwrap the face of a teenaged albino woman though she is cowering with fear behind the gauze.  I cannot understand most of what she is saying but I do understand pain in someone’s posture. The gaping hole in her head where a cancerous tumor has eaten through her outer skull and cheek, exposing the inside of her neck and nasal canal and the top of her eye socket, leaving her ear half hanging on, stared back at me in all its horror.  I looked at my tray of cleaning solution and gauze and felt the despair of it all. Nothing here is going to fix this.  I cleaned carefully but the tissue was so friable that every swipe of the cotton was tear-inducing.  So I covered it back up knowing full well that this one, too, may not see the end of the month.  

From then on it was numbing, all that I was seeing.  Commonplace diagnoses, temporarily fixed with surgical precision, only ending in inevitable infections and complications.  But it’s not the grotesque wounds and laid open abdomens that stayed with me the most, it was the despair behind that nurse’s eyes, knowing she was trained better than this but being completely unable to do anything about the entirety of a broken population trapped in a broken medical system.  I waved good-bye at the end of the day having learned a lot from this battle-weary nurse. The fact that I can walk away from this reality while family members sleep under their loved ones’ beds on the floor, offering their own arms up for blood donations, however; lingers on my thoughts all evening.

Wednesday: Burns Unit

Dressing day today on the burns unit.  It starts comically when I ask the head nurse where they keep the morphine they will give to all the patients for the dreaded dressing day.  She shows me in the cupboard where she keeps the green liquid in a water bottle with a hastily note labelled ‘morphine.’ It looks remarkably like Gatorade.

We line everyone up and the unwrapping of the children begins.  As does the wailing. We set up our stations and we grab our supplies- all the household products that we treat as poisons and potions are lined up: vinegar, peroxide, vaseline, honey, chlorine, and betadine.  I am pleasantly surprised that there are supplies at all in fact. A little less pleasantly surprised when I find all the things hiding under the dressings I unwrap.

The walking wounded file in or are carried in one by one.  This one fell in a fire. This one was set on fire by a mob because they thought he stole a battery.   This one’s car was set on fire. Flesh hanging off of bones, red and meat-raw, ready for dressing.

It was a conveyor belt of misery as a full ward of patients were sent to the ‘treatment room’ that I have no doubt many of these children will have nightmares about as they get older. 

All I could think of for the rest of the evening was the disfigured fingers, the gangrenous toes, and the fragile grafts getting infected.  And of course, how every electrolyte liquid in a bottle now looks like morphine.

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