a gift to be simple

Yesterday I had a patient who needed her hair washed.

Everybody I asked was "too busy" to do it, and it was already 6 p.m. I'd just been through nursing management hell, and was in no mood to do anything but down a double shot of vodka. The tech was the second float of the day, complained she had gotten to the floor late and was swamped and "couldn't promise anything." That had been two hours ago.

I got up from a puddle of tears in the breakroom--my initial inclination was to walk off the floor and never come back, but as a nurse, that's called patient abandonment and involves legal charges against you--and went into the patient's room, faking Everything Was Okay (with the red puffy eyes and tear stained cheeks). She probably couldn't see too well any way, I figured, and she just wanted her hair washed.

So, I washed her hair the best I could with the Fake Hospital All Purpose Cleaner, feeling embarrassed we use the same stuff to wash patients' butts that we use to wash their hair, but her admission was probably costing her around $3000 bucks a day. She was this very nice, sweet lady with the Really Nice Family Members. The kind that actually give a shit about their loved one for the right reasons.

You would have thought I gave her a million dollars, or saved her life using some denture cream and popsicle sticks, or something.

I wanted to thank her. Washing her hair was this no-brainer, completely gratuitous, non-essential-to-life thing, and yet, being what it was, it also gave me a little bit of my humanity and dignity back that day.