Tanya Theriault CWA 2010

Creative Writing Award Winner - 2010

Class of 2010

Tanya Theriault ‘12 is a Cum Laude graduate of Boston College with a BS in Biology. A former managing editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper, she spent over a decade living and working with the homeless in Manhattan and entered Yale to develop the skills necessary to treat those without voice or access. She is enrolled in YSN’s Family Nurse Practitioner program.

Transcript of the reading:

Pull It Together

I must have said yes. However a weak and uncertain affirmation, I said yes. I am standing in the doorway, stiff and listening, momentarily perseverating on the contrast between the grainy, smudged tracks of the floor tile and my tight, all-too-white shoes. “Is this your patient?” the nurse asks. She is loud and confident; I was more like that before today. Warmth crawls up my legs, rising to fill my gut, then my arms and face, as scattered cells are called to attention. Midmorning sun bends around the doctors and nurses who have caved over my patient’s bed, discussing the accuracy of the placement of her feeding tube. Is this my patient? I get uppity.

This? No, she is my patient. She is my patient and, for a full minute, I embody the utmost fraud because I cannot remember her name. If asked right then, I would have rationalized my lapse. The night before I’d been poring over pages, the tops and bottoms of which I had ripped off, removing her name, birth date, anything that would identify her. It was my first responsibility, to maintain her privacy, to protect her. I gathered all of the hospital history diffused within her chart that was supposed to tell me how I was to care for her. Blood sugar of 7mg/dL, seizing and unresponsive in the field; the field is a drug rehab. Twenty- two weeks gestation, stillborn child, her chart reads. Pull it together. High BUN, #4 Shiley tracheal tube, low hematocrit, high gastric residuals, rising bicarb. Protect her…on her 67th day in the hospital, on my first.

I had thought about her recent history enough in the last twenty hours that, as I waited for the tap water to warm up for her bed bath, I was tempted to fill in the gaps myself. Her family is scattered, unsupportive. She is close to an older sibling, maybe. Her hair, had she the strength to do it herself, would be combed with a deep left part, straight, tied back with an elastic. She would look nice in a pale mint green. I washed and worked into motion her scaly, arched fingers which resisted me less with each back and forth, five times, every joint. Half done, it was a good time to change the water. I turn back towards the bathroom and pass a woman coming into the room, pastel scrub top, white pants. I smile widely thinking that everyone knows what my name tag must say along side the standard stuff–name, school, it’s my first day.

“Hey, baby!” I hear her say. Maybe a little too cozy, maybe inappropriate, whatever. I round the bed with fresh, hot water. She looks at me, unimpressed, more so staring down at my patient. Okay, I’ll end this weirdness. “Hi, I am a nursing student….” She says, “Hello.” I manage not to say, Who are you? What are you doing? Can’t you see we are kind of in the middle of something? Again, “Are you…?” “I am her mother,” she reluctantly provides. “Oooh…oh, hiiii,” lengthening my syllables to a ridiculous extent while I quickly export nursing maxims, urine output minimum must be 30ml/hour, from my head and how-to-talk-to-people-like-a-normal-person thoughts fight their way in. Busted. I didn’t expect her mom to walk in, not wearing a get-up like mine, not during my first bed bath. Busted, I made judgments, cast aspersions even. I expected to go slow, be deliberate, but not watched. A few lines of small talk, a morning update and I decide that the water temperature is just not right. I leave the bedside and the mother, dump the water, run it again.

I was warned. Nerves and newness will prune away the competence you came with and you will start fresh. I look into the bathroom mirror, noting the crease between my eyebrows. Pull it together. Nursing is both a noun and a verb. I will become a nurse by doing, by placing myself amid muck and mothering, by studying the evidence, the norms and readying myself for the surprises. I returned to the bed to finish my patient’s bed bath. Mom guides my moves, questions and corrects me. My fear of her presence, her knowledge, begins to recede and I see that my patient is comforted by her attention. That feels good to me, feels like the best thing I have done for my patient all morning. It is not so much a feeling of walking a tightrope, but more like learning to ride out an emotional wave, balancing between the peak of protecting my patient and the trough of territorialism. Working out this tension, I get it, is a consequence and the fruit of choosing to become a nurse. I say, yes.