Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘nurse’

The Words I Want to Embroider into Her Hospital Gown

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 20, 2023| 15 Comments »


Thank you for helping her meet
this day, this night.
Though she needs you now
just to take a sip of water,
she was once a volunteer firefighter.
If you were grieving, she would
bake you sweet bread.
If you were struggling,
she would leave a gift at your door
with a kind letter but no name.
Thank you for being the one
who arrives to help this woman
who always rises to help another.
This is the way we guide each other,
like the geese who change leaders
at the apex of the V when one gets tired
or sick. Thank you for flying ahead today.
The distance we must go is long.

Read Full Post »

Another Night in the ICU

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 16, 2023| 22 Comments »


for Ally
 
 
So tenderly, the night nurse lifts
the blankets from my mother’s limbs
and notes the drainage—
its serosanguinous color, its volume.
She checks mom’s vitals and does
whatever she does with all those plastic tubes
that now tether my mother to her life.
How quietly she moves, like a wraith,
she whispers, as if she’s a wisp,
something insubstantial, a midnight trace.
Yet the gift of her work is great
in this moment when all depends on care.
I marvel at her gentleness, her humanness,
her kindness as she works
and my mother’s chest rises and falls,
rises and falls in hard-won sleep.
Like a killdeer, able to make a nest
in bare soil, gravel, even a paved parking lot,
the night nurse makes of this sterile room
a soft-enough place, a place where my mother
can be safe. Like a mother killdeer,
the night nurse stays close to the room,
her eyes and ears trained for danger.
She’s tracking everything,
determined that all will be well tonight.
 

*

Dear friends, 
wow, thank you for the generous outpouring of love, prayers and well wishes for my mother and for me. I read every single one and thanked everyone out loud by name, and I am sad I won’t be able to respond individually to you, but please know how your kind words and good thoughts are carrying me and Mom. I have a deep abiding peace, despite the new curveballs the day brought. She had another (third) surgery today, and I hope and pray this will be the last and she can now rest and recover. She’s been in the hospital since Oct. 6. She’s had an intestinal surgery, a cardiac event, sepsis, a vascular surgery for lack of blood flow in her arm, an ulcer in her duodenum, dangerously low blood pressure, and today a third surgery to repair perforations that occurred at the point of the original surgery. Amidst all this she is a marvel of positivity, resilience, and kindness. 

And as I said last night, thank you to all who care for those who need healing. I am so so so so grateful. 

Read Full Post »

Letter to the Doctors and Nurses in the ICU

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 13, 2017| 6 Comments »

 

 

 

 

I know it’s your job, to monitor the heart rate as it rises, the blood pressure as it falls. I know the gray-haired woman in the bed is another set of numbers with a name you’ll forget. She’s my mother. She grows tomatoes on her porch and has a song to sing for every occasion. She loves side stroke and chocolate and Japanese art. She makes the best poached eggs, and she knows exactly how to scratch my head to lull me to sleep. I know it’s your job to find the clot. To bathe the wound. To ease the pain. Thank you. Thank you for your hands as they slip the needle into her arms, the arms that gather me when frightened or cold. Thank you for your feet as they run down the halls to examine her heart, her heart that holds so many. Thank you for your art as you puzzle the why of her body, her body that knows itself as a vessel for love and prayer. She is praying for you, even now, as I do, and though you are just doing your job, thank you.

Read Full Post »