The Making of a Nurse (5 page)

SLEEP USUALLY CAME
so easily to me, but that night I lay there stewing until long after Johnny Carson’s lead-in theme song and monologue. When it was over, my father got up and signed off, just like his favourite broadcaster, Walter Cronkite: “And that’s the way it is, February 19, 1972.” My mother came into my room and I pretended to be asleep.

“You awake?” she whispered. She slipped off her shoes and sunk down onto my bed. The darkness seemed to give her even more licence to nestle in close and seek comfort in my arms. I hated how she used my body to make hers feel better, the way one huddles around a fire for warmth. “If only I could be a better mother to you,” she murmured.

Aha! Now, we were getting somewhere!
I sat up eagerly. “What would you do?”

“I would give you the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

But my wishes were so much more modest than that!

“Tilda, what would I do without you? Promise you’ll never leave me. That you’ll always take care of me.” I nodded. “Will you make sure that nothing bad ever happens to me?”

“Yes,” I pledged. “Of course.” I saw no reason why not.

“I am embarking on a difficult course. It may be the fight of my life, but I am prepared to give everything so that I may sing again. I will need your help.” She brought her lips to my ear. “And another thing,” she whispered. “When the time comes, I want you to pull the plug.”

“What plug?”

“Now, I’ll sing you my favourite song.”

A silent rage was boiling inside me. I wanted to push her over onto the floor. I wanted to hurt her. I had been feeling this anger for some time. It was what made me dig my nails into her as I pulled her along, or grab her arm too roughly, or drop her down into a chair with more force than I should have. Sometimes I even thought about not catching her when she stumbled and letting her fall to the ground. As she sang her sad song, my heart heaved with resentment.
Who could be angry at a sick mother?
I
could
. To make up for my shameful thoughts, I pretended to listen to her. For now at least, pledging promises and pulling plugs were momentarily set aside for singing songs. Suddenly, she grabbed my hands. “My life is over,” she cried.

“Dr. DeGroot didn’t say you were going to die.” I pulled away and flopped onto my side, my back to her.

“Tilda, if I get very bad I want you to do me in,” she implored and then looked up at the ceiling as if to beseech the heavens above. “When the time comes, please kill me. It’s the only kind thing to do.” I looked away and pretended not to hear. “Find a way,” she said, and I pretended not to understand.

IT WAS LESS THAN
one year later when I came home from school one prematurely dark afternoon to an empty and silent house. The streetlights hummed with electricity in the blue twilight and Christmas lights blinked on the neighbours’ trees. I entered the house and moved from room to room, turning on lights as I went. When I got to the kitchen and flicked on the light switch, I found my mother at the table, staring out with blank eyes. I ignored her strange behaviour, opened the refrigerator and stood staring into its depths. “Where’s Dad?” I asked casually, mid-bite into an apple.

“In his ivory tower.” Then, of all things, she broke into song.
“Spesso vibra per suo gioco, il bendato pargoletto, strali d’oro in umil petto, stral di ferro in nobil seno. Questo manca …
”

Scarlatti! Why now the blindfolded boy who pierces a humble breast with golden darts? One victim languishing in vain, while
another falls faint? “What’s going on?” I yelled. “Where’s Dad?”

“The hospital. His heart.”

My own heart began pounding wildly.
He’s okay
, I told myself. “He’s okay,” I said out loud to make it so.

“I’ll drive,” she said with a crazy grin.

She didn’t even have a licence, but she got in the driver’s seat and somehow we got there.

The doctor said it was a mild heart attack, but my father should take it as a warning.

How strange to see my father lying flat-out in bed, still and quiet, the colour and life drained from him. He propped himself up on one elbow to sip water from a plastic straw bent into a paper cup. A pretty nurse with a swinging ponytail and pink stethoscope around her neck, whose name tag said “Cindy,” came in and took my father’s pulse with her big, reassuring scuba-diving wristwatch that had dials and buttons on the side. “His vital signs are stable,” she told me.

Adopt me, please!
I madly radioed her.
Take me home with you. I’ll be your little sister
.

My mother and I stayed a few more minutes then kissed him goodnight. When we got off the elevator on the ground floor, she came to an abrupt halt. “Let’s stay here in the lobby. My nerves are shot. I need to gather my bearings.” She dropped into the nearest chair, and I slumped down low in a chair beside her. My mind wandered off. I was drowsy. … She had to gather her bearings …
gathering bearings … gathering berries in the forest … teddy bearings … the Bering Strait
…
I will travel far away … strawbearings … raspbearings
. Sleep was right there behind my eyes. It would be so easy to give in, but I couldn’t, I was on duty.
Dr. Ben Casey ordered me to monitor the patient closely. Get him through the night, he’d said. It all depends on you
. I got up and walked around to wake myself up.

“Don’t go far,” my mother called out, “I may need you.”

The Ladies’ Auxiliary had set up a little petting zoo for the children in the pediatric ward. There was an aquarium of tropical fish and a tank with a branch upon which an iguana draped itself. A parakeet pecked at its reflection in a little mirror, jabbering
“yakkety yakkety yak.” I stared deeply into its blue feathers at the back of its neck and in a few seconds I knew what I would do. One day, I would become a real nurse. It made perfect sense. Being a nurse was what I knew best. I liked spending time in hospitals, where problems were solved, grown-ups were in charge, and people knew what they were doing. Pleased with my new plan, I returned to my mother in the lobby.

“If anything happens to your father,” she said when she saw me, “promise you’ll look after me, that you won’t put me away … in some
place
.“

“Yes, I promise.” I took her hand. “Let’s go home. Have you found your bearings yet?”

“They’re nowhere in sight and I’m worried sick about your father.”

One day, when I’m a real nurse, I’ll be able to leave at the end of my shift
.

O
ver the years, I became very familiar with hospitals. I even grew to love them. In fact, I loved them so much that when I was fourteen, I worked as a candystriper at Toronto General Hospital and spent my summer vacation filling patients’ water jugs and delivering flowers and mail. I must have performed my duties well because the next summer I was promoted to the patients’ lending library and put in charge of the mobile cart of books and magazines. Most patient rooms had four beds and since there was no air conditioning, the windows were always wide open to let in fresh air and the long, billowing curtains flapped when there was a faint breeze. To the male patients, sitting up in bed, eagerly awaiting my arrival, I handed out dog-eared “spaghetti westerns” by Louis L’Amour and to the women, I gave the purple-prose bodice rippers by authors such as Barbara Cartland and Taylor Caldwell. They were all pleased to see me and to receive light reading material to take their minds off their problems.

In the hospital, I felt at ease, almost happy. I liked watching busy doctors and nurses rushing around with a sense of purpose and importance. And the hospital seemed such an equitable and
democratic place. Everyone was in the same boat, dressed in the same flimsy blue hospital gowns and all worried about something. And although it was such a vast, public space, you knew that private, intimate activities were occurring between complete strangers. On any ordinary day, you could see people in various states of distress, crying and moaning, and even though these sights were disturbing, they were fascinating, too. The hospital was a place chock full of mysteries, a repository of intriguing stories. Each patient was a book I wanted to read. Why was that man in the plaid bathrobe sitting in a wheelchair by the window looking so wistful? Why did that woman have a plastic tube sticking out of her nose, and how did it get in there? Why was that old lady tied down in a wheelchair, and why did she keep calling out, “Gladys, Gladys, take me to the bank”? As I walked through the halls, pushing my cart of paperbacks, I imagined that one day I would be a part of it all, a calm and selfless presence ministering to the sick and weary. It didn’t seem as if it would be as difficult to take care of strangers as it was taking care of one’s family members. I couldn’t help my own family, but at least as a nurse I would be able to rescue the rest of the world. Being a nurse would make me a better person.

Best of all, in the hospital, no one knew where I was. I could get lost and not be found. In the basement, there was a chapel and I would often sit in a pew at the back, staring up at the cross above the altar for long periods of time. Other days, I lingered in the hospital gift shop, fingering the pastel knitted booties, pot holders, macramé hanging baskets, and crocheted toilet paper covers (one had a Barbie doll’s head and torso sticking out of it) and imagined those sweet grandmothers who must have made them.

By the end of high school, my path was clear. I was desperate to leave home and pragmatic enough to reason that nurses would always be needed. Yes, nursing would be my ticket to ride, my escape route. There were only a few small problems. I had read the Nurse Cherry Ames books and I knew about her porcelain skin, rosy cheeks, and wholesome personality. I knew nurses were still supposed to be angels and heroes. Me? I had more than a touch of the devil. As for opportunities to be heroic, I’d blown
those, big time. And weren’t nurses supposed to be capable, levelheaded, and practical? They were known to be efficient, sensible, and cheerful. I was none of these things, but I would work on myself, I promised. After all, to be a nurse was such an admirable, altruistic thing and how nice it would be to help humanity in some way or another. How good it would feel to be good!

THE FIRST YEAR AT
the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto, in 1979, was almost entirely spent in classroom lectures. The required courses were physiology, anatomy, microbiology, biochemistry, and Introduction to Nursing Theory, and for my elective, I chose Feminist Studies. I had every intention of being a diligent student, but all too often I got distracted or was overcome by inertia and stayed home keeping my mother company. When I did make it down to the campus, I usually ended up sitting in a coffee shop with my boyfriend, Larry, and then losing myself altogether for the rest of the afternoon in his parked car to the tune of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” which we played over and over on his tape deck.
*
Mind you, a student could sit in those classes, listen to the lectures, write the papers, pass the exams, and never even come near a patient. We only visited the hospital as observers, wearing our navy uniforms and white lab coats, touring the various departments. I wondered where I would eventually work because I didn’t have any particular allegiance to a specific organ, such as the heart, which would have led me to cardiology, or the kidneys so I could have chosen nephrology. And I wasn’t drawn to the relatively happy obstetrics or orthopedic wards, pediatrics seemed far too daunting, and I couldn’t bear to spend much time in the psychiatric wards with its smell of cigarettes, sweat, and despair. The patients there were frightened, angry, or sad, and sometimes all of those things. In truth, it felt too close to home.

During those many hours in the classroom, I sat in the back row with a bag of snacks beside me, watching the professors droning on from the podium. The other nursing students listened intently and took precise notes. I made random scribblings, catching key phrases such as “conceptual framework” or the “theoretical basis of caring.” I took notes about how the nurse was to make “therapeutic use of herself” (there was no attempt at gender-equal language as there was no gender equality in nursing) in order to assist “clients”
*
toward the generally agreed-upon goal of “self-actualization,” which was the “achievement of one’s full human potential.”

Nursing scholars created an entire lingo of “nursing diagnoses,” perhaps in order to be like doctors with their “medical diagnoses,” and thereby raise our status. For example, “Altered level of comfort” meant pain and “Altered pattern of urinary elimination” was the euphemism for incontinent. “Health maintenance disruption” meant, simply, illness. My personal favourite was “Disordered nutrition; more than body requirements,” which meant the patient was overweight.

Sometimes there were debates about what was, in fact, the role of a nurse. They posited a number of theories. One theory was that the nurse was there to assist the patient with self-care and to perform for them what they could not do for themselves. This sounded good to me, but another theory asserted that the nurse’s function was to help patients achieve “wellness” and “homeostasis.” Another invoked the words of Florence Nightingale: “The nurse is to put the patient in the condition for Nature to do the work of healing.” Another position claimed the nurse was a “body expert” and “health counsellor.” Oh, there were nursing theories aplenty, oodles of them!

I think the professors felt they had to justify nursing as a profession worthy of university study. After all, for years, most nurses had diplomas and learned on the job, working in hospitals. One professor insisted that the rightful place of nursing was at the
“Table of the Humanities,” in that it drew from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and psychology. Another argued that nursing straddled an equally secure position at the “Table of the Sciences.” Regrettably, I raised my hand to ask, “Doesn’t nursing also have a place at the
Kitchen Table?”
The professor frowned, but I felt that to be a nurse required certain personal, human qualities such as courtesy, warmth, kindness, and respect, attributes one presumably learned at home. No, they countered. These old-fashioned values held nursing back from making progress. Clinging to these outdated notions kept nursing in the Dark Ages. To be a nurse required skill and knowledge, not merely virtue and morality.