She held my hand as the needle went into my scalp. The pain caught me by surprise. I involuntarily winced and squeezed down on her hand pinching the her fingers around her wedding ring.
She didn’t wince at first.
The needle went in again and this time I squeezed her slender hand harder and this time she had to let go.
She stopped, took a step back, shook her hand, and approached the bed again and grabbed my hand again, expecting more of the same. She got it about ten times more.
Jab, squeeze, and wince it went on for about a half an hour.
She wasn’t the first either.
Earlier in the evening another woman, much younger than the second, softly and reassuringly stroked my arm and grabbed my hand trying to usher me through what should have been and easy insertion of a needle into an Ommaya reservoir. That one too didn’t go so well, but the nurses were more powerful than any anesthetic or pain killer.
Nurses -- I don’t know what they do at home, if they’re different than anybody else, or if they they’re just like the rest of us. But, here at the cancer ward they seem an odd combination of science and compassionate artistry; knowing what to say or do at disparate critical times.
A couple of days earlier, when I went through the chills and Rigors and all, it was three nurses and the doctor who moved with lightning speed to pull it all together. The nurses got drugs, offered encouragement, and told me what was going on how long I could expect to the stuff to last.
Later that evening a wily veteran nurse stood by me all night and walked me through my first chemo session – what to expect, what not to expect, why we were driving forward instead of taking a break even though we had the Rigors episode.
It wasn’t as if she sat next to me like a mentor.
The blue light from my roommate’s TV silhouetted her against the curtain dividing the two patient bed areas. She didn’t look at me directly, but stood there ruminating over dials read outs she’d seen a hundred times before.
I was scared and told her.
She explained what was going on and spoke with such confidence about the next steps that I was convinced it would be okay. As she upped the doses on the drug that caused the Rigors in the first place she kept saying, “You’re body’s used to it now. The worst is over. We are way behind and we need to keep going.
“If you get the chills, we’ll get three of us, wrap you in blankets, climb on top of you, and hold you down until this is over,” she said jokingly (I think).
She was right – of course. I was fine.
I choose to believe she stayed by me all night, although I really know she went to see other patients it still seemed like she never left my side. At 3 a.m. when my first chemo was over I was spent, soaked in sweat, and while I rested we talked.
I drifted in and out and at about 5 a.m. she went and scrounged up some of those little plastic individual servings of coffee that go in a fancy coffee maker and we had coffee and talked about our first cars – both Ford Falcons.
The point is I guess is that she and the others didn’t have to hold my hand, get their fingers crushed, or coax a 53 year-old cry baby across his first chemo finish line. But they did.
Nurses – Where the hell do they come from? You got me, but I’m glad somebody’s making ‘em.
Peace,
Bill
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