Sandra called me cold and wrote it in my file… but I had twelve patients, a dying woman next door, and a notepad that was the only thing keeping me standing.
PART 4
The supply room fluorescent light buzzed one half-note off — a sound I had heard at least a thousand times and never once put in a maintenance request for.
It had become part of the register of the room, same as the smell of the sealed IV bags, same as the particular silence of a space where no one was in distress and nothing was immediately required of you. I was counting saline flushes into a tray when Deb came in.
She didn’t say anything right away. Deb had twenty years on the floor and the gift of not filling silence with noise. She took a box of gloves from the shelf above my head, checked the size, put them under her arm. Then she just stood there, and I knew she wasn’t leaving yet.
“You know what I see when I watch you work?” she said.
The fluorescent light buzzed.
“I see someone who hasn’t lost it.” She said it without particular emphasis, like she was reading a measurement off a gauge. “I see someone spending it.”
I put the last saline flush in the tray. I didn’t turn around right away.
Not losing it. Spending it.
The difference between those two things hit me somewhere below the ribs, in the place where I used to feel things during my car-crying years, and I didn’t cry — I want to be clear about that, I did not cry, because the part of me that cries apparently requires bandwidth I have not had available — but something in my hands went still in a way that was different from the mechanical stillness of the rest of my shift.
Deb set the gloves on the shelf. “I lost someone to this floor once,” she said. “Eight years ago. Good nurse. I watched her go for six months and I kept thinking she’d tell me when she needed something.” She stopped. “She didn’t.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I know you are,” Deb said. “That’s not what I said.”
She left. The light kept buzzing.
I wrote it down. That was the reflex, the system, the thing I’d built to hold what mattered — I pulled the notepad from my left pocket and I wrote: Deb said I’m spending it, not losing it. The handwriting was smaller than usual, the way it gets when I’m trying to fit something precisely.
I heard Deb stop in the doorway. “What did you just write?”
I turned the notepad around and held it toward her. She read it. She stood there for a moment with her hand on the door frame and the half-note buzz of the light above us, and she didn’t say anything, and that was the right response.
“I wrote it down,” I said.
It wasn’t an explanation. But she nodded like it was enough. Like she understood that writing it down was how I kept the things I couldn’t afford to lose.”
PART 5
He was back six weeks later, the man from Room 4, and he came in through the main ER entrance on a Thursday afternoon when the floor was running at a manageable pace, which almost never happened on a Thursday.
His chart said follow-up complication, minor, and when I pulled up his file the cold-sandwich entry was there in the system because I’d documented it properly, same as everything else, but I didn’t connect the name to the face until I walked into the room and saw him sitting on the edge of the gurney with his shoes still on, which patients always do when they’re frightened and don’t want to admit they’re staying.
The thin hospital blanket was on the cart just inside the door — slightly warm from the linen cycle, rough at the hem where it had been washed past its tolerance — and I took it without thinking and moved toward him.
The room smelled like antiseptic and the particular stale-bread quality of a man who’d been sitting in the waiting room for two hours working himself into a manageable fear. He wasn’t screaming. He wasn’t demanding. He was just sitting there, shoes on, hands on his knees, doing the quiet arithmetic of someone who doesn’t know yet whether to be scared.
“Mr. Calloway,” I said, because I use names, I always use names, the notepad made sure of that. “I’m Marlene.”
He looked at me. Not the flat, assessing look patients give you when they’re deciding how much trouble to cause — the other kind. The kind that says: are you actually here.
“Your chart says the pain started again yesterday,” I said. “Tell me where.”
He told me.
He was specific in the way frightened people are when someone asks them a real question, and I listened, and I took his vitals, and at some point — I didn’t plan it, there was no clinical protocol requiring it — I shook the blanket out and brought it over him from the foot of the gurney, smoothing it across his legs, tucking the rough hem under his feet where the cold came up from the metal frame.
He said, “Thank you.”
I said, “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
That was the whole of it. No revelation came to me in the hallway. I did not stand in the doorway and feel the chest-tightening feeling from my parking-lot years. The machine of the floor kept running — Room 9’s drip, Room 11’s discharge papers, the ortho consult that was running forty minutes late. I moved through it.
But at the nurses’ station, I reached into my left pocket. Old habit. The notepad was there, the yellow quarter-page with its small cramped handwriting, the margin notes, the running record of things worth keeping. My fingers found it. I held it for a moment, the familiar worn edge of it, the slight curve it had taken from living in my pocket.
Then I put it back. I didn’t write anything.
I moved on to Room 9, pumped the hand sanitizer, pushed through the door. The smell of it was still automatic, still procedural, still the smell of a woman running on discipline rather than feeling.
But Room 11’s patient had thin, dry hands, and at some point in the next hour I found myself at the supply station looking for the lotion — the small bottle with the pump, the lavender kind — and when I didn’t find it, I made a note. Not on the legal pad. On the supply requisition form, in the section for patient comfort items.
I pressed the pen down harder than I needed to.”
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This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
