Carrie Szejk CWA 2004

Carrie Szejk came to Yale via the University of Maryland where she majored in Journalism. She also interned for the Frontier Nursing Service of Kentucky as well as the American Academy of Nursing. Many of our students have rich diverse backgrounds and Carrie is no exception. She has been a cook, a database supervisor, a copy editor and was featured in the Washington Post Magazine article on living simply in a world of consumerism. She graduated last May and is a Nurse Midwife.

Transcript of the Reading:

Modern Nurse Nancy

Nancy never wears white anymore, especially not pantyhose. White shows all the stains: the blood, the betadyne splashes, black pen ink, baby formula spit up, the mental stains too. White signifies, for her, the early years, when Nancy had to starch and iron before her 7 PM- 7AM shift. She never could understand why it mattered to sleeping patients that her nails were trim and her white shoes polished, unscuffed. The color never made sense either. Not in this field of work, which is messy, and at times, downright dirty. Of course, it wasn’t really for the patients. White was a symbol of piety, and purity, of reverence, and service. She was a new RN then, with a rather unsteady needle stick, answering withx” yes sirs,” and “no maams.” Mostly, yes sirs. She laughs or sighs when she talks about those days, thirty years ago, “when I actually had a waistline.” Now, the only nurses you see dressed in white are on Halloween, or in X-rated videos. These days Nancy wears pastel, size 2X, with purple plastic gardening clogs. Wash warm, dry high, wrinkle free. She cleans the spills off her shoes with alcohol wipes.

Today, she’s wearing a mail-order scrub top with hippo ballerinas dancing in tutus. Her pink pants match. When I see her, even on days when she’s not wearing this top, I think she herself looks like a hippo in a tutu, waltzing down the halls from room to room, balancing a picked-over lunch tray in one hand, a bladder-shaped IV bag under her arm, and a giant peach maxi pad in the other hand.

The modern Nurse Nancy looks a lot like she does: many are age 40 or above, many are overweight, most are overworked. They order Avon at the nurse’s station. They drink Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. They wear pink.

When I ask her a question, if she has the key to the morphine pump, she snaps, “It’s supposed to be in the PYXIS machine,” which I already know. But it’s not. And I have an alarm going off in room 1102. I don’t need Nancy’s attitude, right now. I don’t understand why the older nurses can be so damn mean to me sometimes. I’m new here, only 7 months AFTER graduating from nursing school. And, I’m experiencing what I call the “women eater” philosophy, where the older nurses “eat their young”. But, really, I do understand. It’s been thirty years for Nancy, on this floor, in these hallways; thirty years caring for novice moms, all strangers to her, all of them bleeding postpartum blues; thirty years of popping babes onto cracked nipples, filling rubber gloves with ice to reduce swelling, wiping away fresh green baby poop. Nancy has been answering to doctors since she was 21 years old. Now, the doctors are in their twenties, Nancy is in her fifties, and she still can’t do a damn thing until they write the orders for her. The very word, “orders”, is in itself wrong.

Nancy herself is childless. And, I wonder if she cares at all about these women here on the maternity floor. After all, on any given day, 300,000 women around the world will be giving birth. Thirty years ago, they called this confinement.

Then, later I hear her tell another new mom that hers is absolutely the cutest baby she has really ever seen. She’s seen hundreds of mom and babe pairs come and go, and come again. Yet she has a way of making all of them feel like they are the only woman to have ever done something so amazing, that their kid is truly the most beautiful, or the most alert, or the strongest, or the best eater. When she sees these same women out in public, at A & P, or the Christmas Tree Shoppe, she remembers their names, and their problems: poor latch, massive hemorrhoid, dead-beat dad. Of course they also remember her. How can they forget? She’s loud, and big, wears Disney characters on her shirts, and hell, she’s seen their most private parts. She’s squirted their blood away, grabbed their breasts, quieted their newborn, when no one else could, by running one finger across their forehead, then in a line down the center of their fresh faces, over the bridge of the nose, down, over bowed lips, to the dimple in their fat chins, again and again telling them in a hush that they are the cutest baby she has ever seen.

Still, she doesn’t know my name. She calls me, and all of the young nurses, “Chickee”. Her remarks to me are only about the things I forget to do, or forget to document. She’s testing me. As a nurse, each day you tend to lose a piece of your own dignity to save the dignity of your patient. You might get vomited on. You might have someone ask you to take out his trash. You will pour a dozen cans of ginger ale a day. You will walk miles in your plastic clogs. Nancy and the other seasoned RNs are challenging me to stay, wondering if I can handle getting the c-section patient in room 6 up to the bathroom, dispense my 4:00 meds, Motrin around the clock, teach Mrs. Morgan how to care for her son’s circ, draw bloods for Rh status and iron levels on Penny, hang another bag of Lactated Ringers before Ms. Danner’s IV blows, all before report at 7.

At the end of the day though, Nancy hails me over to the nurse’s station. “Hey Chickee, we’re ordering Chinese, what d’ya want?” I don’t even like the greasy take-out joint near the hospital, but I say, “Veggie Lomein,” because this is the first time in 7 months that Nancy has asked.

Over dinner I ask my coworkers what keeps them there, besides the comfort of a familiar place. Nancy answers first that she doesn’t have a choice, that nursing is in her blood. Her mother was a nurse, her sister, and three of her cousins too. But it goes beyond that. Caring for other people, nursing, is in her heart. For Nancy, it’s the only thing she knows how to do.