Lenore & Me (Part 3)

A young girl in scrubs poked her head into our room, looked at Lenore and spoke in a soft voice: “Ma’am, I’m a nursing student… Do you mind if I sit with you today to observe?  “Observe… what do you mean…?” Lenore asked suspiciously, her frog eyes bulged as she looked the girl up and down.  “Ma’am, I just want to sit with you and take notes on what happens when the staff comes in and interacts with you…, if you don’t mind of course.”  She smiled, which lit up her pretty face.  She was petite, fair-skinned with hazel eyes and thick black shoulder length hair.  Lenore seemed convinced and pointed to the chair on the right side of her bed, “…Ok, you look normal, please sit down…  Now, I wanna ask you something, can you please get my doctor?  They operate on me last night and now they wanna operate on me again, they trying to fool me because I’m old but I know they wanna charge me for two surgeries…”  The young lady sat down and listened as Lenore ranted, her eyes growing wider, “Really..?” she asked, “that doesn’t sound right…”  Lenore finally had someone’s full attention and this seemed to pacify her.  She lowered her voice and bent her head toward the nursing student, who did the same, Lenore confided in her, “They got all kinda people in here, foreigners pretending to be doctors…, you gotta help me, I need to talk to my doctor, please get him for me…”  The girl stared at her and then looked down into her lap, “I think you have the wrong idea…, I don’t work here, I’m a student at the nursing college, I don’t know your doctor or anything about your case…”  Lenore narrowed her eyes as if she was seeing the girl for the first time,

“…What’s your name?”

“Oh, my name is Mina, Ma’am.”

“Mina!  What kind of name is that?!”

“Mina is an Indian name Ma’am…”

“Indian! Jesus Christ, I’m surrounded by foreigners!  I thought you said you were a nurse!  Oh, Jesus, oh Joseph, oh Mary, deliver me from these foreigners!”

Lenore was sobbing, staring at the ceiling when another woman walked into the room.  She was tall and beautiful with blue eyes, her blonde hair neatly pulled back into a classic French chignon.  She acknowledged us all by nodding her head in our directions and politely greeted us, “Ladies…, how are we today?  Mina are you going to be in here today…?”  Mina answered, “…I’m not too sure about that…” Lenore sputtered as she looked at the tall blonde, “You look so normal!  Can you help me, are you a doctor?  Can you get me my doctor?  Please, you look so normal!”  The tall blonde answered, “I’m sorry Ma’am but I’m a professor from the nursing college, I don’t work for the hospital, I’m just here to oversee a class project which the hospital allows us to work on here.”  “But you’re so normal… so white, why won’t you help me?”  Lenore sputtered while choking back tears.”  “…Listen, I’ll see what I can do, ok, I’ll talk to the nurses and ask them to send your doctor to see you, I can’t promise anything though.”  She walked out, looking nine feet tall in high heels, pencil skirt and a white lab coat.  During their conversation, neither her nor Lenore noticed that Mina had moved to my side of the room and was now sitting in the chair by my bed.  After her professor left, Mina asked me, “Would it be ok… if I sat with you today, just to observe…?”  I smiled and nodded my head at her, I smiled because I was still amused by Lenore’s reaction to her being Indian but I was in too much pain to talk and was trying to fall asleep again. I nodded again as she took my hand and patted it.  She smiled back and I fell asleep for a little while.  When I woke up, Mina was still there, by my side, having a peek at my chart.  A searing pain was tearing through my waist, and it was not from my incision, as I thought about it, I realized that it was because my underwear were getting smaller as the area was swelling with post surgery inflammation.  As Mina looked on, I tried to pull off the covers to remove them but I had no strength in my arms.  “Can I help you with something?” she asked.  “This is so embarrassing, but can you help me take off my underwear…? They are squeezing the hell out of me!”  “Of course, It’s ok, let me help me you…”  Mina lifted up my gown and gently pulled off the panties that were viciously cutting of my circulation.  She was really compassionate, I thought she would make a great nurse one day.  “You were crying in your sleep, did you have a bad dream…?”  “Did I really…?  I keep dreaming about waking up from the anesthesia and the pain…  I remember thinking I was dying…  I was so scared and confused.  As I told Mina the story, her dark eyes opened wide.  I tried to imitate the doctor’s Russian accent, I think it confused Mina that I found anything funny about what I had just told her.  She made some notes in her schoolbook and resumed holding my hand.

Next to us, Lenore was in a frenzy again.  “Doctor, doctor, you have to help me!  She shouted this when she caught glimpse of the blonde nursing professor as she walked past our room.  The professor turned back, poked her head in the door and announced “I spoke to your nurse and she is getting your doctor for you.  They should be here shortly.  Ok?  Everything all right, Mina?”  Mina nodded her head at her teacher as Lenore continued ranting, “Mina…, she’s not even a nurse, she try to trick me, she think I’m a stupid old woman… Oh Jesus, Joseph and Mary, deliver me from these foreigners!”

Mina sat with me for another few hours, ignoring Lenore’s racist remarks.  I dozed on and off, trying to escape the pain of my incision and the voice of my awful roommate.  I woke up at one point when Nurse Shawn from the previous night came into the room to check up on me, she took up my chart, read through it then spoke.  “So what’s up pretty girl?  How are you feeling today?  Hope your making up for the rest you didn’t get last night…?”  She smiled as she tilted her head in Lenore’s direction.  “It’s not funny, she kept me up most of the night with that nonsense! She’s a horrible racist, she thinks that I work here because I’m black!”  I whispered loudly.  “No Dawn, she’s just a confused old lady…” Nurse Shawn was laughing, “Anyway, she’s going into surgery this afternoon…”  She was still smiling, I knew I would eventually be laughing about it myself but at this moment it was a nightmare for me.  “Miss Dawn,… you look a little pale there, are you feeling ok?”  Nurse Shawn talked as she straightened up my covers and adjusted my pillows.”  “No, my head is spinning, my throat hurts, I need to take a shower and wash my hair and I want to be moved to another room, away from her!”  But she was still smiling.  “She’s not that bad…” “I know! She’s worse!  She has full on dementia, I meant it and I’m never going to recuperate with her thinking that I work here!”  Nurse Shawn continued chatting with me as if I hadn’t said anything, “You’re going to be starting a liquid diet tonight, then tomorrow you can start on solid foods, so just relax and try no to worry about anything.  I’m off tomorrow, but I’ll see you the next day, ok?  Take care Dawn.”  She gently placed my hand back onto the bed before turning around and walking out of the room.  Mina had let go of my other hand and started up slowly as if she regretted leaving me to my fate of another long, tortuous night of verbal abuse from crazy Lenore.  Mina heaved a huge sigh as she adjusted my covers, neither of us spoke for a while until she was done.  “Miss Dawn, I’m going to get going, I hope you get well soon and thank you for letting me sit with you today.”  She was holding my hand again, patting it tenderly, I said goodbye to her, thanking her for keeping me company and for being so kind.  She let go of my hand gently, turned around and walked past Lenore and out of the door.  I watched her back as she walked into the distance, past the nurse’s station and enjoyed the last few moments of silence before the inevitable…

Nurse Shawn walked into my new room, her caramel skin and perfect smile brightened up the dull hospital as if a light had been turned on in a dark room.  I smiled back at her as she walked toward me.  “You look better, she exclaimed, your cheeks look rosy, thank God, I was so worried about you!”  “You were… why is that?”  “Dawn… I had a day off yesterday and all I could think about was how pale you were the last time I saw you.  I never saw a black person look gray before… it was scary.”  “Well,” I said, “they basically forced me to have a transfusion, 3 pints, they said they wouldn’t release me until I agreed to it…”  “I know, I read your file before I walked over here just to prepare myself… But they did the right thing Dawn, you look like you have blood in you, you look robust.  I’m happy to see you look so well.”  “Wow…” I said, “I’m kind of flabbergasted… I felt like I had been railroaded into doing something I didn’t approve of.  What if the blood was tainted or if my body rejected it somehow… The whole idea made me so nervous!  The only reason I did it was because I thought they would have released me today, which is still not the case…”  I shook my head in confusion as I let the realization wash over me that the blood transfusions had been a good move after all.  I started to relax then as Nurse Shawn led me back to my bed, tucked me in and began patting the back of my hand.  I had been so lonely for the past day and a half, since they moved me away from Lenore, my crazy ex-roommate, and Nurse Shawn had taken her day off work.  “So how did you end up in this room all by your lonesome?”  “I made them move me,” I told her, “I had no choice, I had to get away from that old lady!”  Nurse Shawn gave me an indulgent look as if she still thought I was exaggerating but would allow me to go on just to amuse me.  “I’m not making this up!  She would not let me close my eyes because she thought I was being lazy by lying down and resting!  Her family came to see her, and one of her sons pulled me to the side and apologized to me for her behavior.  He was choked up because they had never seen her so confused before.  She told them that I was supposed to be looking after her and they couldn’t persuade her otherwise.  Later, her grandson dropped in just as she was lifting a pitcher of water to her mouth.  He said to her, “Ma, what are you doing?”  “What do you think I’m doing?  Drinking water, I’m thirsty” she answered, rolling her eyes.  “So why don’t you use the cup then?”  At which she poured water into the matching plastic cup from the pitcher and still continued to drink from the pitcher.  “Ma, I’m worried about you, I never seen you like this before… you’re supposed to drink out of the cup, not the pitcher!”  “Oh that…” she answered, “the cup don’t work, so I use this instead.  What’s the matter?”  She announced this between sips while water slid down either side of her mouth, down her throat and wet the neck of her hospital gown.  I felt so bad for her family, her grandson walked out of the room, shaking his head in a daze, with tears in his eyes.  The last time you visited me, Nurse Shawn, I guess she got our names mixed up and she started pleading with me, “Shawnie, Shawnie, do you love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and all the holy saints?  If you do then get up and help me, NOW!”  By the end, she was crying and screaming, it was unbearable.  She thought the little clip on her finger was an IV, so she kept taking it off and insisting that she was going to “starve” herself until I got up and started working.  She kept threatening that she was “a gonna jump outta da bed and break her other leg so she could get to me and make me do my job.”  She continued to complain to the holy saints that I “didn’t look like any patient she had ever seen before,” clearly because I’m black.  Shortly before they came to move me, she demanded from your Indian nurses aide that he “get her doctor immediately,” after she begged the Virgin Mary in a thick Italian accent, to deliver her from these foreigners.  She followed this up with a benevolent thought, “…ah, I guess those God-damned Indians gotta live too…”  Right at that moment, in walked two tall, thin, elegant Indian men in lab coats, carrying clipboards and talking to each other in hushed voiced.  Lenore’s eyebrows raised to the ceiling as her mouth dropped open at the sight.  When she caught her breath, she said to them in a panicked voice, “Excuse me…, excuse me…, can you please get my doctor for me…?”  The two men were looking at her chart and one of them held up a finger to her, indicating that she should wait until she was addressed at which she started gasping for air in surprise.  When they had reviewed her file, they walked to her bedside and announced to her shocked face, “Vee are your doctors, M’am…,” in posh voices lilting with combined Indian and British accents.  I couldn’t have been more tickled!  The thing she wanted the most, a white doctor to “deliver her from these foreigners” was the opposite of what she got.  Her doctors were Indian and snobby on top of that!  I heard them explaining to her that she had not had any surgery yet, that they would be operating on her later on that day, after she had been prepped.  At this point I was attempting to walk with my IV to my new room as two nurses aides pulled my bed from it’s spot behind me.  They informed me that I was to lie down in the bed as they wheeled me down the hall about twenty feet away to this empty room and that was that.

Nurse Shawn was laughing at my story by this point, I stopped talking to look at her and she explained, “its your delivery Dawn, your very funny, I’m sure you know that!”  I smiled genuinely for the first time in three days, despite everything I had been through I always like it when people found me funny.