Jessica Pettigrew CWA 2007

Jessica Pettigrew, 09 a first year nursing student is an Honours graduate from McGill University where she received a BA in International Development. A native of South Dakota, she has engaged in international research before YSN. She is also entering the nurse midwifery specialty, as did her mother, another Yale alumni.

Transcript of the Reading:

The Prince and Me

I fumble with two small plastic tubes and squeeze their contents into the opening at the end of the oxygen tubing. Careful not to dump all of it out, I screw on the mask, holding the empty tubes between my knuckles and using each digit deliberately not to spill or drop anything. When the mask is screwed on, I hold it in one hand and reach past all of your tubes and lines to the second oxygen gauge on the wall. I turn the knob up to six since six liters of oxygen makes the liquid treatment a gas. As the steamy mist erupts from the mask, I secure it to your head, carefully, oh so carefully. I think to myself, this is like Halloween, you’ve got your mask on; it is scary and steamy, and maybe this is all just a farce. Maybe you’re just dressed up as patient and I as nurse. As I’m thinking this, I realize that there is something familiar in this, this way I am acting and feeling toward you. Your large strong hand is sandwiched between mine and I am feeling your skin, not in a clinical way, but really feeling the rub of your warm hand against mine. And I am looking at you with a familiar gaze. Then I realize this is love. I act toward you with love. But why? Why love? Why not compassion? Or empathy? Why such an intimate emotion as love? I leave the room.

As three people fumble with your IV pump, I sit on the bed again, rubbing your back, trying to send life from my hands into your sick body. I try. I rub with such attention. We hear the continual beep, drip, beep, drip, of the pump. “Torture,” you say in a Russian accent, winded and weak. “The Chinese, they have this torture.” You pause, to cough and like a coordinated dance, I hand you a basin to spit out thick brown phlegm. If only you could cough it all out, all the cancer. “They drip water on your head, over and over, slowly. You, you go crazy in the end. Crazy from the drip drip drip. My torture is almost over.” I am stunned. I don’t know what to say. The IV herd leaves the room. I don’t know if this is what I should say but this is what comes out: “You know, you are standing on the edge of something so big that no living human has ever experienced it. It is another phase…you’re on the edge of something huge.” Tears start to seep from my eyes and I want to hug you and hold you and stay with you on your bed all night. I want to make sure you have water and juice by your bedside, that you get up to use the commode, that you don’t lay in your own excrement, that you are treated with love. I want to meet your wife, your dear Annika. To see this woman whom you love…

After bargaining with the nurses, I’ve haggled our way to a new pair of compression stockings. You deserve better than the soiled ones you’ve had on for the past five days. I help you sit up on the side of the bed, feeling more like an old partner in crime than a nurse (hahaha! We’ll show them! We’ll show them that for a few minutes, you’re not sick. You don’t need stockings!). I fill two pink basins with soapy water and work the stockings off with some effort. They are so tight! Skin flakes off as I pull them down, but I don’t care! It is just skin: cells, meaningless cells. I wash your feet with holy attention. So this is the ritual of nursing. I wash your legs. I scrub the flaking skin, revealing a new, shiny layer underneath. If only we could do that with your cancer. Take out your pancreas, and lungs, and have brand new shiny ones underneath. I know in your eyes there is a brightness which has been stolen, but it is there, underneath, I know it is. If I could get it back, shiny and new…

“Thank you, thank you thank you.” You are repeating this over and over in barely a whisper as I dry your feet and legs. I don’t want it to end. Because if it doesn’t, you move no closer to death; and I move no closer to leaving this room and never seeing you again. I dry your limbs and attentively rub lotion on your feet and legs. As we work together to get you laying in bed again so I can put the stockings on, you grimace with pain as I lift your heavy, swollen legs onto the bed. “I am fine, I am fine, I am fine,” you whisper, more to yourself than to me. I painstakingly pull the tight stockings up over your so-swollen legs. I help you brush your teeth. You do it with such attention. You’ve been spitting out brown stuff all day, what if I weren’t here? Would your teeth still be cleaned? Or would you go to bed with the brown juice clinging to your teeth?

Now you’re ready for the night. I don’t want it to end. This is your swan song. “Jessica, you’ve done something for me which no one else has done since I’ve been in here. You’ve been with me, as a person.” Breathe, cough. “You are my Cinderella, an angel.” Breathe, cough. “When I am gone, and when the world ends. I will be there saying ‘God spare Jessica’, ‘God spare Jessica’ ”. Again, I am speechless. So I resort to touch, my second language. I run my fingers through your hair and look at you with such love and pain. And I try to thank you and explain how much you mean to me and I know my words will fail me so I try to communicate through that last touch. You grab my hand “thank you, thank you, thank you”. I pull myself away and give you one last look, and our eyes lock and hold on to that moment, suspended in time, you and I. I turn and head out into the light of the fluorescent hallway, never to return to you.