[This post and the others on this topic was written on paper in fragments or even less – single word prompts for ideas – at the time of the events – and assembled later. It’s taken a while to put things together… not through any particular emotional difficulty but just lacking the energy and willpower to do much in the weeks right after the surgery, in addition to a certain perfectionism with respect to the project which I’ve now managed to finally abandon.]
Fifth Shift Word: Suffering
The night nurse of my fifth shift in the ICU seemed to be assigned to me for the same reason as the fourth shift nurse had been: out of my reputation for being “low maintenance” and because she was relatively new or inexperienced. She seemed incredibly young – I’ve had middle-school students who seemed more mature and self-assured. But my fifth shift nurse also turned out to know English the best of any of my nurses.
The fifth shift was by far the most terrible of all my shifts in the ICU – but the reason it was terrible will surprise you – it surprised me. And it ended up being the most epiphanic, too, for that same reason.
You see, the head nurse of the Friday-to-Saturday night shift was a kind of insecure, whiny-voiced Hitler. I call her in my memory and in anecdote “the hitler nurse” – she would rant and rave and berate her staff at any moment whatsoever. She would berate her staff while standing right at patient bedside, criticising their efforts, asking if they were incompetent, insisting they try harder next time. This was bad enough for me, who barely understood, half the time, that this was the content of her rantings – how would be to be a Korean, lying, half-dead and hooked up to some machine or another, and having this hitler nurse standing beside the bed yelling at the nurse in charge of your machine, saying “you did that wrong, you goddamn idiot, etc., etc.”?
I felt guilty, because I felt I had brought the wrath of the hitler nurse down on my own lowly caretaker, and she was clearly suffering because of it. She was agitated. She would make mistakes. She would sit and stare as if trying to gather the strength to continue. She was a person deeply troubled by the horrible treatment she was receiving from her boss and by her own insecurities and inexperience.
At the very beginning of the night shift, I’d asked for “suction” (see previous post). I needed the liquid vaccuumed out of my lungs. Only afterward did I realize my newly assigned nurse wasn’t experienced with this procedure – she was not gentle, she was not fast or efficient, and it was so painful that had my mouth been working properly I would have screamed bloody hell. And afterward I allowed my gratitude to evaporate and I insisted that something had gone horribly wrong during that session of suction, and I made the mistake of showing something written to that effect to the head nurse.
So then the head nurse decided to berate my attending nurse about her failure to care “properly” for her patient for the rest of the night. The hitler nurse yelled at me too – saying well, it’s hard, getting the suction, of course it hurts, what’s your problem, anyway? I was really angry. I was really scared. I wrote the two top things to the hitler nurse – first, 천천히 말하 (talk slowly), and then, 이해못해 (I don’t understand). In both cases, I was digging my own grave deeper, as they are impolite forms.
A bit later, to my own nurse, I wrote the part below, 미안합니다 그냥화났어 (I’m sorry just I got angry). Finally, I tried to explain that in prior suction events it hadn’t been bad, but I think I explain it badly there and I’m not sure it made sense.
I felt so bad. The young woman didn’t deserve it – she was just inexperienced. And she was so shaken by the situation she was making other mistakes. She dropped a thermometer on the floor. She misplaced a syringe for a medicine update. I was terrified. How was I going to recover this mess? I needed to get the attending nurse back on “my side.” I wrote her a note, saying we had to work as a team. I promised to be a good patient.
The transformation wasn’t instant, but suddenly she revealed her excellent English to me. Several hours later, we’re engaged in what can only be called an almost-philosophical discussion of my previously mentioned Scylla and Charybdis (sleep deprivation vs pain – see previous post).
The conclusion of that rather “deep” conversation was that she urged me that sometimes, I will just need to let go of the anticipation of the pain of the suction procedure, and let myself sleep, as that was more important. So, in fact, I slept. And each of her suction procedures improved over the previous, until she was barely hurting me more than the previous nurses had been. I got to be her practice subject for the procedure, and once I’d decided I was going to ally myself with her, it was as if I could stand the pain, better, too.
I ended up making a handwritten thank you card for her on a scrap of paper torn off from my pad, and we developed a good rapport.
I ended up entertaining her with cartoons. And I wrote my epipany in the lower right of this sheet.
The epiphany: “In the end I cannot stand cruelty and unkindness even more than pain.”
I realized with bleak clarity that the cringes and flustered unhappiness produced by the hitler nurse’s constant berations were more painful, to me, than anything I was experiencing physically. That is causing suffering in the human psyche, and for no good reason.
Arguably, my suffering of the body is nothing beside that – for my body’s suffering can be more easily ignored, being in the body, and further, it has a clear reason, which is the cancer and our feeble human efforts to combat it.
What reason is there to be unkind to others?
