The statue of the nurse, created by Llardo, is one of my favorite pieces in my apartment. I gave it to Kris on our first Christmas together. Often, when I glance at this statue, I think of Kris and how she looked when I would meet her in the lobby off Mass General at the end of her shift. Were the nurse statue ever broken, my heart would break as well.
This evening, however, the statue reminds me of the time when I too worked in a hospital.
This evening, however, the statue reminds me of the time when I too worked in a hospital.
Let’s get the details out of the way. In 1967, Forsyth Memorial Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, offered a program of summer work and education to high-school students interested in medical careers: doctors, nurses, and technicians. I was sixteen years old, a rising junior, and along with a friend was accepted into this program. On our first day in the hospital, the director assigned us to different floors where we would work at minimum wage as nurse’s aides. Twice a week we would attend lectures from members of the staff regarding their professions.
My fourteen classmates received assignments to general medical units.
The director of the program placed me in the operating and recovery rooms.
At the time, this assignment excited me very much, and my memories of that summer remain, as you will see, vivid. Then and now, I feel fortunate and grateful to have partaken in this experience, though many today would doubtless question the wisdom of putting a boy—or girl—of sixteen into an arena of scalpels, blood, and open flesh.
Like my classmates, I arrived at the hospital around 6:30 and worked until mid-afternoon. My duties included transporting patients to and from the operating room, mopping blood and bits of sutures from the floor after an operation, carrying various objects to the lab, and helping patients in the recovery room, holding bowls beside their heads to catch their vomit, wiping their faces, and talking to them as they woke from their anesthesia. (I spent a good amount of time in the recovery room, as the other orderlies, two black men and a Davidson College graduate named Pete who was bound for medical school, disliked the work there.) During my free moments, the staff encouraged me to watch various surgeries.
Here in no particular order are some of memories from that time:
*On my first day, I observed a nephrectomy conducted by Dr. Norfleet, whom my father, a physician with hospital privileges, described as a “gentleman of the old school.” The nurses had draped the patient in green sheets, and Dr. Norfleet, on learning who I was and why I was there, called me closer. “Take a look,” he said, and I bent closer and then closer still, staring at a mess of blood and tissue. “Don’t stick your nose in it!” he barked, and I backed away.
*I was walking along a corridor when a nurse emerged from one of the operating rooms and handed me a package shaped like a Christmas stocking and wrapped in white gauze. “Take this to the lab,” she said, and I walked down the corridor carrying the bottom half of a human leg. It was heavy; I remember being taken aback by the weight. Another nurse who had taken a liking to me viewed my passage with concern and dismay. “Do you know what you’re carrying?” she asked. I replied in the affirmative, and she just shook her head and walked on.
*An orderly asked me to help him while the nurses changed a dressing on a burn victim. The burned man sat on hospital bed, and we held him upright as two nurses replaced parts of his dressing and applied various medications. This man was so badly burned that I wasn’t certain whether he was black or white. The burns covered every inch of visible skin from his hairline to his waist. He moaned as we held him, and I felt sick and sorry for him in his pain.
*A man arrived with a foot injury. He had been mowing his lawn in flip-flops and had run the mower over his big toe. The toe was sliced in half horizontally as neatly as if by a razor.
*One of my duties in the operating room involved carrying two gallon steel pails of water, blood, and urine to a special drain in another room. (I assume now this liquid was the product of D&C procedures, but I was too dumb then to realize this.) For years afterwards, I had only to think of this task and the acrid odor of those buckets would sting my nostrils.
*The worst operation I ever saw—I was in the room less than thirty seconds—was for a cancer of the sinuses. The procedure involved cutting a flap of skin from part of a woman’s face, placing the flap across her face to be stitched up later, and then digging for the cancer. One of the nurses left the room sickened, saying to me “Thank God there are doctors who will do this sort of thing.” For the last sixty years, I have remembered that scene and have hoped and prayed I would never undergo such horrific surgery.
*Two doctors and several nurses had cracked and pulled apart a patient’s breastbone, revealing the man’s beating heart. I have no memory as to the purpose of this operation, but recollect standing at the foot of the table and marveling at this mechanical pump—white, blue, and red in color—that keeps each of us alive.
Other incidents from that summer come to mind: the crude remarks of the orderlies; the tale that the oldest of these orderlies had spent time in prison for murder; the kind head nurse and the old German nurse, Mrs. Rheum; Dr. Glod, a fine surgeon who occasionally exploded during operations, cursing and throwing instruments at the wall; the groans of the suffering in the recovery room.
I learned a good deal that summer about the human body and about human nature. Looking back, I wonder how much I learned about compassion. I practiced it, yes, but I’m not sure I learned much. An example: once another aide and I delivered a teenage girl to the operating suites for some routine surgery. As we swung through the doors leading from the OR lobby to the surgical suites, the girl screamed “No! No! No!”, heaved herself from the rolling stretcher, brushed past our attempts to prevent her exit, and darted like a shot toward the main lobby, clad only in one of those absurd gowns that amply reveals the patient’s rear parts. The girl became a joke among the orderlies and nurses: she had escaped twice before in other hospitals, and we found humor in this third hegira. Cruelty, not compassion, charged our laughter.
But I was only sixteen, and I hadn’t lived nearly enough to apprehend the many faces of suffering. I just didn’t have the tools. And though that was almost fifty years ago and though I have sat, like anyone my age, in classrooms with anguish and pain as my teachers, my capacity for hurting others through carelessness, indifference, or stupidity still comes to the fore from time to time. I joined in the laughter about that poor girl, and I have since laughed often at my fellow creatures or given them cause for scorn and anger for my own mistakes and sins.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: Were I to die tomorrow, that confession might best suit the inscription for the granite above my grave.
My fourteen classmates received assignments to general medical units.
The director of the program placed me in the operating and recovery rooms.
At the time, this assignment excited me very much, and my memories of that summer remain, as you will see, vivid. Then and now, I feel fortunate and grateful to have partaken in this experience, though many today would doubtless question the wisdom of putting a boy—or girl—of sixteen into an arena of scalpels, blood, and open flesh.
Like my classmates, I arrived at the hospital around 6:30 and worked until mid-afternoon. My duties included transporting patients to and from the operating room, mopping blood and bits of sutures from the floor after an operation, carrying various objects to the lab, and helping patients in the recovery room, holding bowls beside their heads to catch their vomit, wiping their faces, and talking to them as they woke from their anesthesia. (I spent a good amount of time in the recovery room, as the other orderlies, two black men and a Davidson College graduate named Pete who was bound for medical school, disliked the work there.) During my free moments, the staff encouraged me to watch various surgeries.
Here in no particular order are some of memories from that time:
*On my first day, I observed a nephrectomy conducted by Dr. Norfleet, whom my father, a physician with hospital privileges, described as a “gentleman of the old school.” The nurses had draped the patient in green sheets, and Dr. Norfleet, on learning who I was and why I was there, called me closer. “Take a look,” he said, and I bent closer and then closer still, staring at a mess of blood and tissue. “Don’t stick your nose in it!” he barked, and I backed away.
*I was walking along a corridor when a nurse emerged from one of the operating rooms and handed me a package shaped like a Christmas stocking and wrapped in white gauze. “Take this to the lab,” she said, and I walked down the corridor carrying the bottom half of a human leg. It was heavy; I remember being taken aback by the weight. Another nurse who had taken a liking to me viewed my passage with concern and dismay. “Do you know what you’re carrying?” she asked. I replied in the affirmative, and she just shook her head and walked on.
*An orderly asked me to help him while the nurses changed a dressing on a burn victim. The burned man sat on hospital bed, and we held him upright as two nurses replaced parts of his dressing and applied various medications. This man was so badly burned that I wasn’t certain whether he was black or white. The burns covered every inch of visible skin from his hairline to his waist. He moaned as we held him, and I felt sick and sorry for him in his pain.
*A man arrived with a foot injury. He had been mowing his lawn in flip-flops and had run the mower over his big toe. The toe was sliced in half horizontally as neatly as if by a razor.
*One of my duties in the operating room involved carrying two gallon steel pails of water, blood, and urine to a special drain in another room. (I assume now this liquid was the product of D&C procedures, but I was too dumb then to realize this.) For years afterwards, I had only to think of this task and the acrid odor of those buckets would sting my nostrils.
*The worst operation I ever saw—I was in the room less than thirty seconds—was for a cancer of the sinuses. The procedure involved cutting a flap of skin from part of a woman’s face, placing the flap across her face to be stitched up later, and then digging for the cancer. One of the nurses left the room sickened, saying to me “Thank God there are doctors who will do this sort of thing.” For the last sixty years, I have remembered that scene and have hoped and prayed I would never undergo such horrific surgery.
*Two doctors and several nurses had cracked and pulled apart a patient’s breastbone, revealing the man’s beating heart. I have no memory as to the purpose of this operation, but recollect standing at the foot of the table and marveling at this mechanical pump—white, blue, and red in color—that keeps each of us alive.
Other incidents from that summer come to mind: the crude remarks of the orderlies; the tale that the oldest of these orderlies had spent time in prison for murder; the kind head nurse and the old German nurse, Mrs. Rheum; Dr. Glod, a fine surgeon who occasionally exploded during operations, cursing and throwing instruments at the wall; the groans of the suffering in the recovery room.
I learned a good deal that summer about the human body and about human nature. Looking back, I wonder how much I learned about compassion. I practiced it, yes, but I’m not sure I learned much. An example: once another aide and I delivered a teenage girl to the operating suites for some routine surgery. As we swung through the doors leading from the OR lobby to the surgical suites, the girl screamed “No! No! No!”, heaved herself from the rolling stretcher, brushed past our attempts to prevent her exit, and darted like a shot toward the main lobby, clad only in one of those absurd gowns that amply reveals the patient’s rear parts. The girl became a joke among the orderlies and nurses: she had escaped twice before in other hospitals, and we found humor in this third hegira. Cruelty, not compassion, charged our laughter.
But I was only sixteen, and I hadn’t lived nearly enough to apprehend the many faces of suffering. I just didn’t have the tools. And though that was almost fifty years ago and though I have sat, like anyone my age, in classrooms with anguish and pain as my teachers, my capacity for hurting others through carelessness, indifference, or stupidity still comes to the fore from time to time. I joined in the laughter about that poor girl, and I have since laughed often at my fellow creatures or given them cause for scorn and anger for my own mistakes and sins.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: Were I to die tomorrow, that confession might best suit the inscription for the granite above my grave.
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