sea salt

Is it OK if I look at your feet?   I pulled off her socks, not surprised by the cool, swollen feet underneath. These are the feet of congestive heart failure, and I'd grown accustomed to seeing them; I gently pressed my finger into the skin to leave an indentation, estimating the scale of swelling based on how deeply I could indent. I inspected the heels, a common site for pressure wounds, relieved to feel the skin intact. Would you like me to rub some lotion into your feet?   She nodded eagerly, and with great effort reached down to the side pocket of her recliner and pulled out a bottle of Aveeno. I smiled as I rubbed the lotion into the thick lines of her heels, like dried up rivers of some ancient landscape; in between her toes, the dried skin flaking off; into the tops of her feet, gently redistributing the fluid; along the bottoms, using as much lotion as her skin would drink.  * I'd just started my clinical rotations in nursing school and was figuring out what I co...

 "I'm going back to Vietnam," I told my husband, pulling on my scrubs. I was referring to my new patient, a man I'd seen the day before and left his home feeling like I would never truly be able to explain what I'd seen or how I'd felt, and that nobody would really understand except the three of us in the house: the man, his wife, me. I don't pretend to know what it's like to be at war, but I do know what it feels like to have my senses overwhelmed, to be completely spent physically, emotionally, mentally...and then to hop back into the regular world of homework, dishes, birthday cards. Whiplash. Re-entry. I knocked. His wife hugged me. "I'm so glad it's you again," she said. He was exactly as I'd left him the day before. Exhausted, in agony, puddles under his feet as his body filled with fluid that had nowhere else to go except to leak out through his skin.  In nursing, we call this weeping .  My mind was racing. What next? Where...

People like to hear about the maggots. It’s a good story, and I’m a good storyteller. Their faces register horror and shock while they beg me to continue, asking, “What did you do ?” I tell them, because even as they pretend to cover their ears and playfully say, “I’m going to be sick,” they want to hear the story. It’s gross. It’s shocking. And it’s just far enough outside of their reality that it doesn’t really scare them. So I tell them how I went to visit a patient and change the dressings on her legs, and when I took the dressings off, a swarm of maggots came crawling out of the wounds. I tell them how I sat there, stunned, for a whole minute before I did anything, and I tell them that my experience as a mom was a lot more helpful than my experience as a nurse because I had to just swallow my panic and not react. I tell them the woman was very old and I was kneeling on the floor and didn’t want her to get scared and kick me in the face, so I just kept saying calmly, “I’m almost d...

I didn't know the heart I couldn't hear was purple. When I put my stethoscope on his chest and pulled my fingers back so as not to mistake my own pulse for his, I heard nothing. It was the quietest I'd ever experienced with a stethoscope, no big vacuous lung sounds, no gurgling alien bowel sounds, no tick-tock-thump-thump heart sounds. Silent. I knew the heart inside had stopped. But I didn't know it was purple until I read the obituary a few days later. * "I got the call!" I shouted to my husband, who was perched on the edge of our daughter's canopy bed for bedtime books. "I'll be back in a little while." I pulled on my scrubs, grabbed my nursing bag, and ran out the door. The on-call nurse had promised she'd let me know if anyone died so I could go with her to pronounce, a skill that I had yet to learn but desperately needed to, now that I was done with orientation and officially out on my own as a hospice nurse.  "Have you seen a ...

It was 3am. Too early. Penny cried as another tooth was staking its claim in her gums. We went through the usual rounds: kisses, Tylenol, rocking, shushing. We work through these steps simultaneously anxious about not waking Jolene, and also trying to impart calm and comfort to a miserably uncomfortable baby. She feels what we feel, even if we don't say anything. Our bodies tell more than we ever want to admit, whether through a forced smile, a genuine hug, rocking arms that are either tense with worry or relaxed with calm, holding onto that baby so that she feels--rather than hears--"I've got you." * "I'm pregnant!" the woman said to the screen. She was having a video call with a family member, a young woman.  "Oh, congratulations," the young woman said with kindness but not enthusiasm. "That's exciting." "It's a boy. I'm due at the end of the month." Another nurse and I exchanged smiles. This woman was not preg...

"Think of five things in your life that are meaningful," instructed our dementia training leader, "and write them down." The PowerPoint slide had a cartoon robber on it, under the words:  DEMENTIA IS A THIEF. My partner and I took out the scraps of blue paper and began to write. I was almost paralyzed by how broad the assignment was--of course, people came to mind first, but that can't be all she meant? Would I write down each of my children individually, or just write "family" on one and consider everyone a part of it? I looked around and people had their heads down, writing steadily. Time was ticking and I had to start. I stared at the blue scraps and wrote the first thing that came to mind: sisters . To complete the rest, I thought about what makes a day good for me--spending time with my husband and daughters, doing something physical, learning something, and writing in some way.  Our scraps of paper heavy with the weight of life's meaning, we ...