Finding a Pearl

Have you ever stared out over the dark face of life’s cliffs and wondered why and how you ever became a nurse? It makes sense for a while as it pays the rent and puts a good meal on the table, but what about the heart?

When our honorable pact with compassion becomes shaken like a dry martini there is always that one moment that will bring us back (right back where we started from).

My moment happened this week on Flo’s birthday; you know, Miss Nightingale if you're nasty. The patients were connecting in the hallway like a centipede, stretcher to stretcher, in the ER. The merriment included asthma patients, four at a time, sitting in chairs sucking on Albuterol and sharing the gossip of the street. At least 2 alcoholics were restrained on my team with the usual barrage of “Let me go!”, “Untie me!” and the all too familiar, “I gotta take a piss, Lady!”

These chants can drive a nurse crazy especially when stepping over the trail of ripped-off condom catheters lying in the hallway like remnants of last night’s lust. Triage nurses were giving report to my deaf ears but I heard one word that shocked me into the present --"Isolation.” As nurses we all hate that word. It means work...and a lot of it.

The isolation room is dark, damp and lonely. I put on the suffocating mask and flimsy paper gown and walked in to find a very small woman huddled in her gurney bed shivering with chills. Her name was Pearl and I could tell she had been a pretty young girl before the AIDS had danced on her face stamping out the luminous signs of innocence and beauty.

At first I was angry, why was she placed in isolation simply for living with HIV? But then she coughed up tissues of blood before me and I had immediate comprehension of the situation. Pearl was being ruled out for TB. I felt her forehead and could feel the fever under my gloves, her sweat dripping hot like lava. She was as skin-n-bones as the stray cat I chase on my street to feed. I was aware of her abandonment by humanity and I got my nurse on. I wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. I knew she had seen enough rain, it was easy enough to recognize.

I have had my share of downpours so I said to her, “Pretend this is a rainbow.” She stared at me as if looking out of a foggy window. She didn’t understand English but somehow she knew I was going to stick her for blood samples and IV fluids. She held out her arm, I stuck her and missed not once but three times. She was dehydrated and her veins were flat, not even a streetlamp could find them. It is torture for a patient when a nurse can’t place an IV line, it takes on a feeling of acupuncture.

I became frustrated but she didn’t flinch, instead offering her other arm. She lay very still in the sounds of silence offering no complaints or ridicule as some patients are quick to do. I pushed her makeshift bed to the side and tried again, this time finding the small venous river and I smiled under my mask. She reached up and lightly touched my cheek and I knew that it meant, “You did good.”

In return I gave her Tylenol and antibiotics and then came back with a tuna sandwich and grape juice filled with chipped ice. With this small gesture she smiled with the grace of a swan, but still no song. She was alone in her room and I knew there were no family or friends. I'm always mindful about that.

She drank the juice and then she closed her eyes and I knew what she was doing, she was praying and sending her secret thoughts to heaven. She was grateful for the small moments that made her feel human again. She fell asleep as I was getting ready to leave her room, and I wished for the peace that lit up her isolation and captured my moment.

She held herself under that torn hospital blanket, and in her tranquility I heard a choir of diamonds and pearls and I knew that there was beauty in the words.

Nurses are known to wear their heart on their sleeve and our emotions sometimes hide in plain sight. I hope everyone had that sweet moment during Nurse’s Week.

And from my heart to yours, thank you for your support.