maggots
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...