Midnight Mutterings | Nurse Ratched 

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS BY JACKIE BATES |||

I have been off island assisting my adult son as he recovers from knee replacement surgery. Will be returning in a couple of days for more of the same. I hope I do a better job this next time.

My experience with ‘professional’ nursing is limited to a brief enrollment in a BS program at UNC Chapel Hill a very long time ago. I never meant to be a nurse, but at barely seventeen without a high school degree, I couldn’t think what else to do. At that time in the dim past, women (um, ‘girls’ I think we were called) could not enter the university as general freshmen. We had to wait until we were juniors before we could join the men (um, ‘men’ I think they were called) at the oldest public university in the US.

The exception was in the professional medical programs: nursing, medical technology and pharmacy. It seems that the science background we might attain at some place that accepted ‘girls’ was inadequate, and so we were allowed to mingle with males, albeit from special buildings with locked doors and curfews and dorm mothers. I was never sure if we were locked in or the dangerous world of male humans was locked out. I lasted in nursing school exactly one semester. In February I made my way across the campus to a dorm for junior ‘girls’ and enrolled in the medical technology program with ‘real’ science classes. I think there were two of us that year. The other was a ‘town girl’ who could study anything she wanted as long as she lived at home with her mother.

But back to the present. Eventually, I did get some practice helping family members when they were sick or recovering from surgery, including a decade with my daughter’s long illness, but nothing prepared me for my recent brief stint with my middle aged son, who had never really been sick, and had certainly never been limited in his ability to take care of himself and move around on his own. Due to a complication after surgery, his leg was immobilized and he had none of the usual opportunities for practicing his skills with his new knee or doing complicated physical therapy exercises. All that got delayed and begins next week.

Meanwhile, I went into this with every intention of being gracious, helpful, patient and selfless—all the things that we know about nurses. Well, that’s not how worked out. I fixed meals when he wasn’t hungry, woke him when he was resting, wanted to talk when he didn’t and didn’t want to listen when he did. All this time he was the only one getting the good drugs. In addition, he had a lot of appointments. I can’t remember a time since the day he turned sixteen, that I wasn’t the passenger when we were in a car together. He had been an easy baby, self-contained but sociable enough. He was smart, funny, even-tempered, curious and philosophical. He fledged at the proper time and that was about it. 

When his sister was suddenly seriously ill in 2007, he moved back to the area to help her and stayed on as her primary caregiver for the next decade. They lived a few blocks apart and he did the driving, errands, entertainment and laundry when she needed it, as well as the occasional middle of the night ER run, and I did the medical stuff, going off island for her frequent appointments and hospital stays in Seattle, returning to the island after picking up Sybil-the-Cat from my son’s house. Worked out pretty well, I think. It is a lot easier to be a family ‘nurse’ surrounded by professional, saintly nurses, amazing physicians, and all the bells and whistles of famous hospitals and their staff in a pre-COVID world.

Last week, I couldn’t recognize my son or myself. We were both terrible at our new and very unfamiliar roles. We hadn’t lived together in decades. I didn’t know how to help him and he didn’t know how to be helped. Neither of us was marginally graceful, patient or selfless. 

Next week it will be different. I’ll be perfect and he’ll be a patient patient. We’ll have fun and he won’t call me Nurse Ratched. If he does, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear.

Note: Reference is to the Nurse Ratched of the stage play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the 1975 movie with Jack Nicholson, not the recent Netflix thriller series, which I haven’t seen.