A Story from a D.C. Nurse by Kate Smith

Kate Raymond put me in touch with Kate Smith, who is a nurse and a writer.  I emailed her the following request: "Tell me a story about living and working in D.C. ... off the top of your head,  go for ten minutes, let it rip."

She wrote back: "Ten minutes off the top of my  head. Ok. I can do that:

 

Sometimes I feel bad because I don't think of my patients beyond the moments that I'm with them.  I am a paper bag and they are a torrent, a waterfall I can not contain.  I care, genuinely, standing over them, helping them undress, asking them about their childhoods and grandchildren as I pierce their flesh, the bevel of my needle always pointing up.  When I walk away, I usually don't blink.

There is one woman who never leaves me, though.  During sleepless nights I imagine her on the streets and wonder if she's safe and if her baby is still alive.  My prayers for her are simple - for a coat, for enough food, that she doesn't walk in front of bus.  She walked through the door at 18:50, I picked up her chart at 18:57.  It was a Thursday.  A man was waiting for me. I'd made chocolate mousse for dessert.  My skin was clear and the sky was pink and yellow.  I almost put down the chart.  Nobody keeps triaging through shift change.

It took her a few minutes to gather up her baby and all the plastic bags, to cross the lobby and fall into the chair in my triage room.  Chest pain, breast pain, stomach pain, itching.  The bottoms of her earlobes were split in two where someone had yanked the gold hoops down through the flesh. She'd found duct tape, pieced them together. Gold hoops back in place, a problem she'd solved herself.

That was 13 minutes, but only because I looked up the medical term for earlobe because it bothers me how much I've forgotten.