Christie Watson | Excerpt from The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story | Tim Duggan Books | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,508 words)
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it's becoming normal for me. It's amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn't always like this.
The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I've been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.
Aaron's room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child's hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more of this post
WordPress.com
![[New post] Alaska’s Law Enforcement Crisis](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vreg9X2NKmJcuWVuyYkDAqBVMY6-7gHD2IqjM45lkGKf9HwYk6kH6vtrw7J1Y0ZEIfc718E0WKn3JWvCiCs6XGSN2G_GgrMC0A5T3k_rtPGokSoHTV4Uf54RX1jl3JmYBvvar9twdd0so1bI9kTAvoEZhwDsrN5mz3gJwLCY24c7G3ajOU5Bwj4pWCmfSb9kzheg40k_0lbr341hY=w680)
0 Comments