light refresh-mints

“Mrs. Watson? This is the hospital; your husband has expired.”

These were the cruel words, so cavalierly delivered, that greeted my mother at 4:30 a.m. last Thursday and changed her life—and mine, my sister’s and the rest of our family’s—irrevocably. The nurse used just those words, and didn’t ask if my mother were alone or not—fortunately, my sister was with her, to comfort her and to take charge during my mother’s resulting and understandable hysteria.

I wonder sometimes why some people, so obviously unsuited to a caring profession like medicine, especially direct patient-care nursing, choose such a field anyway. Throughout my dad’s long battle with kidney disease, peritonitis, and later his kidney transplant and most recently three weeks with Guillain-Barré, he had been mostly blessed with excellent care and compassion from the physicians and nursing staff; two nurses from the Virginia Transplant Center and his supervising nephrologist even have become like members of the family. But there always seems to be a bad apple or two, and one of the nurses assigned to the CCU his last three weeks was one of those.

Mom was able to create a particular bond with the day shift nurses, whom she saw frequently, as she was at Dad’s bedside every possible minute she was permitted; she participated in his care and treatment to the degree possible and permissible. During the hurricane, before she lost power, she even had invited several of them to stay over at the apartment if they needed, and she and they shared food and stories of their lives. They all knew that she had moved from the hotel to the hospital-owned apartment, and knew how to reach her there; the information was in Dad’s chart, as well.

The night nurses, though, did not have the same rapport with Mom; they were never on duty during any of the short visitations permitted by family. One in particular never seemed to be interested in communciation with my mother, and Mom reports that she often seemed exasperated even to speak briefly to my mother each morning when she would call the hospital to check on Dad’s progress over night—the other nurses encouraged us to call as often as we wished, but this one nurse always made Mom feel guilty and as though the five-minute call each morning was an imposition.

Unfortunately, she was the nurse on duty the night Dad died. I don’t doubt that she did everything she could to resuscitate my father (apparently he coded once, was revived, but then coded a second and final time), but her care just didn’t extend beyond her medical expertise. She did not know that my mother had been moved—by the hospital—from a hotel to a hospital-owned apartment, so she tried to call my mother only at the hotel, taking three hours to finally reach her at the apartment when someone else realized the mistake. And then she delivered the cruel message in such a casual style and followed by admonishing my mother—adding to her feelings of guilt and despair that she had not been at his bedside when my father died—that she “had been trying to reach [her] for hours,” as though it were Mom’s fault that the nurse hadn’t looked up the correct information in Dad’s chart, or hadn’t bothered to listen when Mom had told her about the change of address—which had occurred two weeks earlier.

Even now, in the midst of my grief about my father’s death, and the complicated mixture of other emotions, I get so angry when I think of the way that this woman unnecessarily and unprofessionally added to my mother’s burden.