Before I became a Poultry Princess, I was a nurse. LPN school was exactly a year long and Clint and I talked about it. We would give up our lives for one year…no new purchases, just hunker down and get me through school. The kids were young and if I was ever gonna do this, it would be now. I was NEVER going to be happy if I didn’t have an education…have some letters behind my name. I had worked as a nurse’s aide for years and had a lot of common sense about nurse type stuff. My mom is a nurse and I used to read her nursing books when she was in school, just lay on the couch and read through them. So I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into. I went to the local nursing program and applied. The good news was I was accepted immediately. The bad news was Clint made too much money for any financial help. So, Clint sold the 4 wheeler and as the school year progressed, he would load cows up and sell them one at a time to pay bills and buy groceries. A couple of weeks before I graduated, he looked at me and said “you better get done with school…I’m bout outta cows.”
With the knowledge that my husband was paying out of his pocket for this, I was determined to do my best. I studied and worked hard and made good grades. There were 3 or 4 of us who had a friendly competition to get the highest grade on every test and it alternated with each exam. We would crow loudly amongst ourselves if we were the highest score and sweetly accuse the others of cheating if we were a point or two behind them. I am proud to say I was in the top scorers of my class, but I will admit to not being the highest. But, of course, they were cheating. J
But….then we had clinicals. I was familiar in hospitals and nursing homes, having worked in both in some capacity since I was 14. Some of the gals and guys had never set foot in a hospital except to visit someone. So, they paired up the old hands like me (by the way, I was 25) with some of the newbies.
So off to clinicals we went, the nursing homes and small hospitals….the delivery rooms and new babies…the pediatric units…the surgical suites…there were adventures in every new place and I fully intend to fill you in someday.
But…today….we will talk about psychiatric units. They paired me with Kathy, a wonderful older lady who had always wanted to be a nurse. She was smart and attractive and had a wonderful way with patients. She had that softness, that caring that some nurses lack. After nursing school, she went to work with an OB doctor and was a wonderful asset to that clinic. All the happy pregnant ladies…all the babies…even in the tragedies that are part of bringing new life, she would cry with them and pray for them.
On this day, Kathy and I were paired with Jonathan, an 18 year old boy fresh out of high school who wanted to go into nursing. He was smart, but…as I stated…an 18 year old boy. He was unintentionally hilarious and was learning about the human body in ways most 18 year old boys would find uncomfortable to do in the midst of married, middle aged moms.
They placed us in the lock down unit, where they put the most out of control patients. Some were schizophrenics that had stopped taking their meds. Some were failed suicide attempts, still with the bandages tightly wrapped around not-yet –healed wrists. Some were so out of touch with reality that in the world they would jump in front of cars or leap off of buildings, fully expecting to fly.
So, Jonathan and Kathy and I were herded into the locked unit. We were instructed to do suicide checks every 15 minutes and given a clipboard with each patient’s name. We were told to visit with the patients and try to orient them on who and where they were. We were told all these things and then, the nurses that ran the unit walked thru the door to their nurses’ station/breakroom behind shatter proof, sound proof glass and lock the door behind them with a solid thud.
So we happily went about our jobs, industriously checking off boxes on the clip board and visiting. Jonathan settled in with a young man who thought he was “the 7th son of the 7th son of the most high god on high that reigns supreme and all superior.” Apparently, this 7th son business interfered with his delivery job and he was fired and was found naked on his housetop building a shrine. He said this as though he was telling me he had picked up some ground beef at the store, just very easy and normal, just part of his daily life. And I guess it was.
Anyways, while Jonathan talked to 7th son of (you know the drill) Kathy and I went from patient to patient, from room to room, cheerily checking off boxes and visiting.
A couple of hours into this, we noticed a patient missing. There was nowhere to go except the bathroom with no lock on the door, so we waited a little bit and then knocked on the door. The patient missing and assumed in the bathroom was a 40ish woman, solidly built and totally in the grips of her schizophrenia. To read her chart, to read about her childhood and abuse was sickening. Kathy and I felt for her and had visited with her during our sojourn around the unit.
That’s when I heard the water running and noticed water coming from under the door. I screamed “I’M COMING IN!!” and yanked the door open. Kathy was right behind me and we struggled to understand what we saw.
The patient…I’ll call her “Mary”…had her head wedged under the faucet with her face in the sink. The water was on full blast and her head was nearly submerged. Her body was limp, her face blue. The only thing holding her up was the sink. Without thinking, I unwedged her head and yanked her up, turning off the water with the other hand. I saw that she had saved a plastic wrapper from lunch and had used that to cover the drain and fill the sink. Kathy screamed for Jonathan to go get help and alert the nurses. Jonathan ran and we could hear him screaming and yelling and banging on the windows and doors, trying to get the nurses attention. We heard him, but the nurses did NOT.
It was at this point, Mary suddenly came to life. I had her left arm, Kathy her right. We had been holding her limp body, trying to drag her into the hallway to perform CPR if need be. She came to LIFE with GUSTO and was HACKED that we had rescued her and she calmly began throwing Kathy and I around in that tiny bathroom, screaming LET ME DIE LET ME DIE!! Kathy was being flung hither and fro, up and down. I yelled “Kathy!! Hold her close!! Snug up to her!! She can’t throw you as far!!” I had learned this from working with cows and horses, that you are actually safer at times to snug up and hang on. If you got a few feet away, they can kick or run over you. But snugged up, you just get thrown around a little.
So that’s what we did, just hung on for dear life so she couldn’t harm herself. We bounced all over the psych unit, the patients calmly watching the TV and hardly looking at us. Jonathan kept running back and forth saying “I can’t get their attention! They aren’t coming!” and Kathy and I just kept up this dance of trying to hang on and being thrown and bounced. Finally, the nurses came and rescued us (and Mary) and got her in a soft, padded room (yup, they exist) and the 3 of us sat down in the nurse’s break room and tried to process what had just happened.
That’s when our clinical instructor came and quietly walked us from the psych unit. She informed us we couldn’t go back. I said “you mean, not go back today?” and she said “no…you can’t ever go back…none of us can. We’re being thrown out of the psych unit.” Kathy and Jonathan and I processed this and the clinical instructor said “you’re not even supposed to be IN the locked unit without a psych nurse, much less doing suicide checks by yourself, locked in with the patients. You could have been killed.” She paused and said “I was in with another student, if they had told me you were locked in, I would have pulled you out myself and reported the nurses to the nursing supervisor.”
As it turned out, the hospital found out that the nurses had allowed us to do their jobs while they took it easy in the breakroom. They were all written up and admonished and as their punishment, the nursing students (and all their help) was taken away. Forever.
And so, that was my experience in the psych unit. There are several things I think about when people say “I can’t believe you gave up your nursing career to be a CHICKEN FARMER. Don’t you miss it?” This is one of those things.
A lot of stuff went thru my head as Mary threw me around, as she screamed LET ME DIE…like…I’m not going to be here next time. One day, she’s gonna succeed. I don’t know what happened to Mary… I wish I did. She is a star in a funny story…but she is a tragic person. I still pray for her.
Kathy and I were so bruised and sore the next day, we just hugged and cried. I miss Kathy. We kept up with each other by phone after nursing school and then one day I got a call that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Kathy died one summer and I made the drive to her hometown to go to her visitation.
Her husband recognized me immediately and held both my hands and he said “Kathy said you made her laugh every day in nursing school, you made even the psych ward story funny and she loved to tell it, imitating you as Mary threw you both around.” He said Kathy would exaggerate her southern accent and yell “ COME ON NOW, KATHY!! SNUG ON UP TO HER!! SHE CAIN’T THOW Y’ALL IFFIN’Y’ALL ARE SNUGGED UP TO ‘ER!! JUST LIKE A CALF, KATHY!! SAME THANG!!”
It makes me smile that Kathy found humor in that day with Mary. I wish she and I could get together and act it out again, like we did for our nursing class, using Jonathan as Mary. He played along and threw us around and we saved the day. I miss her.
Then, for our final act, we would pretend we were thrown out of the psych unit right on our keisters without so much as a thank you.
But…you’re welcome, anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment