In order to make sure my left leg wasn’t clotting to the
point of no return, a nurse would come in every hour, remove my special yellow
anti-skid socks (pointless given that I was not allowed to stand up on them and
test their skid-blocking abilities), smear a gob of cold blue jelly on my foot
and check my pulse with a shoe-box-size machine that totally looked like some
cheap fake prop from a 1950s sci-fi flick. The nurse would stick the end of a
metal probe into the foot jelly, turn a big dial, and listen as the doohickey hissed
and whined until eventually it found the familiar lub-dub of a pulse. Then the
blue goo would be wiped off and the yellow sock replaced, inevitably catching
on one of my ragged toenails and threatening to pull it off. The nurse would squeal
in dismay and apologize profusely; I would shrug. Distance runners get used to
shaking the detached toenails out of their socks.
In the hospital bed, not sleeping, not able to move, not
wanting to succumb to self-pity yet feeling pretty damned pitiful, I listened
to the night shift nurse quietly enter the room to take my pulse. The procedure
was the same every time, but the night shift nurse seemed particularly adept at
doing what needed to be done efficiently and unobtrusively. And each time, after
she took my pulse and wiped the jelly off with a paper towel, she would run her
hand over the side of my foot to make sure she got all the goo off—gently, like a whisper, ever
trying not to disturb me. In that hospital bed, sour with sweat, blood matted in my hair, bruised, punctured, feeling in every way unlovely and foul, I saw someone who cared enough to make sure that least my foot would not be coated with disgusting goo, that at least in some little way I could feel clean again.
Touching someone’s foot can be quite intimate. In this case
the touch was not erotic or arousing, but it still seemed moving, somehow. I recalled a line from early in Toni Morrison’s
novel The Bluest Eye, where Claudia
describes the seemingly harsh way she was treated when she was sick as a child
but then, with an adult’s understanding, realizes that the anger she thought
was directed at her might actually have been anger over her suffering. She
remembers something else, too: “someone with hands who does not want me to die.”
Nurses, like teachers, balance a sense of caring with a
sense of professional duty. They are paid to show kindness, or what is often
perceived as personal kindness rather than skills borne of training and
experience. But even job-related kindness is a precious commodity; not everyone
takes that one extra step, after all. In fact, kindness in any form can seem
rare to the point of extinction. There is such endless
emphasis on love in popular culture that kindness is often overlooked in terms
of what’s most valuable in life. The reasons are obvious: kindness isn’t dramatic
or sexy; it could even be seen as wimpy, given by the
soft to the weak. It’s the stuff of maudlin aphorisms, the likes of which make
people go “aw” and hit the “share” button right before they move on to
guffawing over some celebrity fashion faux pas.
Just wait, though. Some dark moment of your life, someone
will show you kindness in some small way and you’ll understand just how much it
matters. This could have been a very bad week. It wasn’t. So many people who
didn’t have to do what they did for me did it anyway. When I rose to stand
yesterday for the first time in five days, I felt shaky, I wobbled, but I
stepped forward. I knew there were hands all around me, the hands of
people who didn’t want me to fall.
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