My Father's ReflectioN

(I'm re-posting this story in honor of a man who inadvertently made me a better nurse.)

My father once loved a prostitute who wouldn't marry him. Instead, that red-headed "taxi dancer" said "Marry my daughter," so he did. And that's how my parents met.

My mother was 15 and my father a 22-year-old boxer in the Marines. What was to follow was La Vida Loca personified.

Many nurses walk around with an idea of quality health care without paying much attention to the reality of it. That is, until the person needing the care is their sister, brother, favorite uncle or, in my case, a father; a father who in his retirement spent a lot of time drinking Budweiser under a mango tree (in the can...never the bottle!).

Under the life of that giving tree was where my father reflected on his own life:
- He thought about his 8 children, and his baby girl who died while he was in Vietnam.
- He thought about the mother of those children, his crazy wife, whom he loved heart and soul, and how she left him while pregnant with another man's child.
- He pondered about his eldest son, a gay male nurse. "If only his mother had cooked more vegetables," he told his friends at the Veteran's Center.

My father spent so much time on the nails of nostalgia that he ignored the nail under that mango tree. The one he stepped on.

Life continued this way until he ended up in a hospital bed with a black foot and freshly amputated toes. He was a diabetic as well as a drinker.

I flew home to Hawaii to find him in full-blown withdrawal, in a hospital room on the 7th floor.

"She's at the window," he said, his hands displaying all the tremors of an alcoholic.

"Who's at the window?" I asked.

"Your mother," he answered pointing towards the mountains. "She's standing on the ledge wearing her pink nightgown. She wants me back."

"Dad, mom is dead. Besides she could never fit on that tiny ledge, she weighed 250 pounds."

Then I heard the sound of shells. No, not the pearly shells from the Pacific, but the shells from a chicken. My stepmother was sitting in the corner of the hospital room eating hard boiled eggs and rice balls. She was Filipina and never tired of saving money.

"Auntie Rose, didn't you smell my father's rotten foot when you were at home?"

She looked at me annoyed and said, "Of course I did! I thought it was a dead rat."

Just then the surgeon entered the room placing a consent form in my hand for a partial foot amputation. "The infection is getting worse," he explained. "This might slow it down."

"You just cut off his toes, now you want half the foot?" I cried with disbelief.

The surgeon was a about to write me off when I told him I was a Registered Nurse and would not tolerate the "Chop-Chop."

"This is a leg, not a rack of lamb," I shot back. Then I boldly said that I wanted him to perform a below-the-knee amputation. "Cut off the leg," I said. "It's what is going to happen anyway. There will be no chop-chop with my father. He's strong enough to use a prosthesis when he's well."

The surgeon gave a concerned look and said, "What is that smell?" After eating half a dozen boiled eggs, Auntie Rose had started to fart, quickly dispatching the surgeon.

The day after his surgery my father was hysterically blaming his primary nurse for his missing leg. As soon as she walked out of the room he yelled, "That fat nurse cut my leg off! Don't let her near me again!" I could tell my father was improving...he had started to display the mean behavior of his former life as a Drill Sargent. His tremors gone and fever lifted, he asked me to call "the good nurse. The funny-man nurse." (I love older people's euphemisms for the gays.)

He then described the care this male nurse had given him when he was scared and alone in the dark. That man had washed his face and told him that everything was going to be all right. That man changed his diaper, then his gown, and lifted him up to sit in a chair while he changed the sheets.

They sat together and watched the lady in the window disappear. Her pink duster vanishing in the wind. He had told this male nurse his sins and that man held his hand for awhile, and seemed to forgive him.

Then the pain medication took effect and my father fell into a quiet, peaceful slumber. I stood up to go find this male nurse to thank him. As I washed my hands in the sink I suddenly saw my father's face staring back at me in the mirror. It was a middle-aged version riddled with worry and yet gleaming with hope.

It hit me, this was my father's encounter with an unsung hero. The person who took care of my father and helped him through the haze of withdrawal was a good nurse. That nurse was someone's brother, uncle, friend, and someone's life partner.

That nurse was someone's son.

That nurse was me.