put his loafers on the wrong feet, and abscond naked down the hallway, sliding along the wall as if he were installing wallpaper.
Noncompliant was the term the nurses grumbled about Paul, the rebellious patient in Room 252, the running man. Their irritation was easy to understand. Often overworked, with a slew of demanding patients, they didn’t need an errant patient who at unpredictable intervals might risk something really dangerous. Their nightmare was a rehab patient falling, breaking a hip or a wrist, hitting his head, or injuring himself in some other way while under their care. Small wonder Paul’s escapes made them crabby, especially a senior nurse I’ll call Martha, a brusque, stocky woman whose tone of voice drummed her rank. I had the feeling I greatly annoyed her, too, by hanging around so much and seeking a nurse’s help for Paul whenever he needed it.
Trying to stay eagle-eyed, I was haunted by the memory of a close friend who had almost died in a hospital after the wrong dose of a drug was given. Fortunately, she was visited just in time by a well-wisher who happened to be a physician’s assistant and acted fast when she arrived and found our friend lapsing into a coma. Slip-ups occur in hospitals far too often, and it’s no wonder—shifts change, patients hate being there, difficult cases are de rigueur, and some doctors and nurses will be seasoned and compassionate, others less so. And Paul was noncompliant , which really irked Martha.
In contrast, Nurse Marty was mellow and rail-thin, a man with lanky brown hair and a genial smile, prone to discussions about old movies and philosophy of religion. Nurse Melissa, a heavyset woman in her early twenties, usually arrived grouchy, and spoke to Paul in a holler, as if his inability to comprehend speech meant that he was also hard of hearing. I’ve since learned how common this is for aphasics; a well-meaning friend or stranger compensating by speaking louder, as if hammering the words might somehow drive home their sense. Other nurses filtered in and out, and they soon merged into a uniform flow of uniforms. One minute the doorway to the room was empty, the next it framed a complete stranger bent on intimacies. A split second of surprise—from where had this one materialized? Then my left brain’s interpreter, asking Why? might find a quick clue before I even knew I was curious, and feed me the most likely answer.
Liz, a senior-year nursing student interning at the hospital, first appeared as magically as everyone else did. I knew Liz was a student because she was wearing the telltale nursing-student whites . (Cricket players and nursing students had that in common.) And I’d seen shoals of students in the hallway with their instructors. I’m sure she has her orders , I thought warily, sizing up yet another new nurse, but won’t have had much experience, so I’d better monitor her.
A tall woman of maybe thirty with short blond-streaked hair, Liz was shaped like an upside-down triangle—with muscular shoulders over slender hips and legs. We would come to know Liz very well, and in time I would learn that she’d muscled up from her part-time job, heaving bales of hay and mucking out stalls on a thoroughbred farm. Wearing no makeup, she looked cute in a healthy, outdoorsy way, and entered the room briskly, shadowed by another nurse, a slightly older woman with a stockier frame.
“I walked in hurried and rushed, as I almost always felt as a student,” she would tell me later, “nursing preceptor behind me, watching to make sure I didn’t flub up. Administering medication comes with piles of rules, for good reason. We were trained to start with the five R’s: Right Time, Right Place—oral? subcutaneous?—IV? Right Dose, Right Drug, Right Person. Right Person means proper patient identification, which means you methodically ask the person for their name and birth date, and double-check their answer against your medication chart and their
Noncompliant was the term the nurses grumbled about Paul, the rebellious patient in Room 252, the running man. Their irritation was easy to understand. Often overworked, with a slew of demanding patients, they didn’t need an errant patient who at unpredictable intervals might risk something really dangerous. Their nightmare was a rehab patient falling, breaking a hip or a wrist, hitting his head, or injuring himself in some other way while under their care. Small wonder Paul’s escapes made them crabby, especially a senior nurse I’ll call Martha, a brusque, stocky woman whose tone of voice drummed her rank. I had the feeling I greatly annoyed her, too, by hanging around so much and seeking a nurse’s help for Paul whenever he needed it.
Trying to stay eagle-eyed, I was haunted by the memory of a close friend who had almost died in a hospital after the wrong dose of a drug was given. Fortunately, she was visited just in time by a well-wisher who happened to be a physician’s assistant and acted fast when she arrived and found our friend lapsing into a coma. Slip-ups occur in hospitals far too often, and it’s no wonder—shifts change, patients hate being there, difficult cases are de rigueur, and some doctors and nurses will be seasoned and compassionate, others less so. And Paul was noncompliant , which really irked Martha.
In contrast, Nurse Marty was mellow and rail-thin, a man with lanky brown hair and a genial smile, prone to discussions about old movies and philosophy of religion. Nurse Melissa, a heavyset woman in her early twenties, usually arrived grouchy, and spoke to Paul in a holler, as if his inability to comprehend speech meant that he was also hard of hearing. I’ve since learned how common this is for aphasics; a well-meaning friend or stranger compensating by speaking louder, as if hammering the words might somehow drive home their sense. Other nurses filtered in and out, and they soon merged into a uniform flow of uniforms. One minute the doorway to the room was empty, the next it framed a complete stranger bent on intimacies. A split second of surprise—from where had this one materialized? Then my left brain’s interpreter, asking Why? might find a quick clue before I even knew I was curious, and feed me the most likely answer.
Liz, a senior-year nursing student interning at the hospital, first appeared as magically as everyone else did. I knew Liz was a student because she was wearing the telltale nursing-student whites . (Cricket players and nursing students had that in common.) And I’d seen shoals of students in the hallway with their instructors. I’m sure she has her orders , I thought warily, sizing up yet another new nurse, but won’t have had much experience, so I’d better monitor her.
A tall woman of maybe thirty with short blond-streaked hair, Liz was shaped like an upside-down triangle—with muscular shoulders over slender hips and legs. We would come to know Liz very well, and in time I would learn that she’d muscled up from her part-time job, heaving bales of hay and mucking out stalls on a thoroughbred farm. Wearing no makeup, she looked cute in a healthy, outdoorsy way, and entered the room briskly, shadowed by another nurse, a slightly older woman with a stockier frame.
“I walked in hurried and rushed, as I almost always felt as a student,” she would tell me later, “nursing preceptor behind me, watching to make sure I didn’t flub up. Administering medication comes with piles of rules, for good reason. We were trained to start with the five R’s: Right Time, Right Place—oral? subcutaneous?—IV? Right Dose, Right Drug, Right Person. Right Person means proper patient identification, which means you methodically ask the person for their name and birth date, and double-check their answer against your medication chart and their
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