Rules

For the first time in these months of being in and out of hospitals, both with Robert’s surgery and then with all my visits, I met someone, one of my nurses, young and Hispanic, who was…um…how do I put it…let’s just call her…Stickler Nurse. Robert says she was just doing her job. She’s someone who colors within the lines. She could bend a little to make my life easier, but she is just that tad bit authoritarian, using that tone that makes you want to tell her how old you are.

“No,” she says, just a bit too quickly,” I can’t unhook your IV line (so you can take a walk around the ward without bumping your toe Clunk against those rollered feet at every step.) Other patients take their poles with them. You have to stay hydrated.”

Hydrated? I have buckets of water going into my system. OK, bags.  I have so much saline going into my system I’m visiting the bathroom like I have hidden Dove dark chocolate bars in there. (Which I don’t because I can’t taste anything thanks to the chemo and the saline dripping from my IV pole.) I’m a bit taken aback, because other nurses have unhooked me when I asked and let me walk around unfettered.

I’m easily the youngest person on my floor, which is an oncology ward (it took two visits and five days to learn this because I am so observant). Most of the patients leave their doors open and as I walk around (Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.), I see some of them passed out on their beds. I can’t stand the idea of strangers watching me sleep, so I keep my door closed, but I realize that here, these snapshots of crumbling life are just scenery—no one’s watching. Very few of the rooms show movement, and when these people do wake, maybe their scenery through open doors of passers-by in the corridors gives them comfort. But as soon as I can, I want to get out of bed and walk around. The pace I keep these days of low red blood cells, meaning low oxygen and shortness of breath, is slow anyway, but the clunk slows me down even more, and I think of ways hospitals could make exercise easier. They tell you to get out of bed and move around and then hand you an eight foot pole with six ungainly feet to take with you. Hmm. What kind of traffic jam would it create if all of you took the therapist’s advice and moved around the halls with all those poles at once? What kind of glorious accident could you cause? What tangle of IV lines and meds and rollers and fluttering gowns? 

See what rebellious thoughts a hint of authoritarianism can cause? We are wired to bristle.

So in this visit to St Catharsis I learn about rules. They are good rules but not perfect: You can’t let your overtired husband nap on your bed while you and your friend take a long walk around the ward going Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.  You can’t take your own meds. (I know duplication could be dangerous, but I have yet to be offered mine.) And speaking of dangerous, if you have a red alert on your door, your visitors have to stay suited up the whole day. How long is a visit going to last like that!? Fortunately, I get this one revoked, but I have to go to the top. After a visit from the Infections Control Team, thankfully I get demoted from dangerous to “she has a cold,” (and it’s not Stickler Nurse that calls them.) I appreciate that they listen and are willing to reassess and take the alert off the door for me. Most of my experience with hospital staff has been like this. On my last visit, unhitched from my pole, I didn’t know the rules and actually walked right out the double doors and down the hall and into the maternity ward. Since I was wearing my green gown (oh yes, and my bald head), I was pretty obvious, and the heads at the reception desk snapped up and redirected me, and when I walked back sheepishly through the double doors into my own ward, my nurse was coming in from the elevators and joked with me, “It’s a good thing you came back. We were just about to call a code yellow (missing patient) on you.”

I’m sure glad it wasn’t Sticker Nurse that found me outside that door. She reminded me you can do a job competently and follow all the rules and still miss just a little something. It made me wonder how many times I do that, do something right but miss the opportunity to bend, to listen, to give a reminder good-humoredly, to adjust that extra little bit that means a lot to someone. And it made me grateful for the hundreds of people I’ve met in the last months that have done their job well and then added something more, something I didn’t deserve, something technically outside the rules but well within the spirit of the law, like a jaunt around the ward without an IV pole. For there is also grace on hospital floors.