Finding Myself in the Eyes of Patients  

His chart read: Twenty-two-year-old black male, gunshot wound to C-2, quadriplegia. I entered his room, stood at the bedside. He was groggy, opening his eyes, seeing me. Then something like jolting pain flashed across his face—not physical pain, but the pain of awareness, of remembering…he could only move his head.

He forced a smile, fought against the ventilator tube as he rode breaths to say— “Nice, nice. They like me here, see. They send you. Ronnie gets what he wants.” A staggered response, but still snappy, cool, setting limits the way he saw them, giving him control, because he had none over any other part of his body, his life.

I fumbled for my instructor report, scribbled words describing this man, the life I would care for. He had me, a nursing student. But as far as I knew while appraising him, that was all he had. I had a family, power over my arms and legs. I could enter nursing school in my forties, learn about the filtering capabilities of the kidney, the diverse functions of the brain. I could plant a garden, have sex with my husband. I had recently delivered my third child. But now…could I do this?

With little guidance from my over-taxed instructor or from Ronnie who struggled to talk, I was it, the person who would bathe him, push nutrients through his stomach tube, talk to him–I was all Ronnie had.

Ronnie knew how to control the room. His comments were quick, pointed. And in quieter moments during that shift, I leaned about the many girlfriends who still came to visit him. For if he did want to make an impression on me—he succeeded. Patients often define us by how their lives bump up against ours. It’s not just a touch—sometimes it’s more like a hard slap.

On the ventilator unit at Oak Forest there was reality, hard, crushing reality, lives being aided in a process healthy people take for granted: breathing. And days later, walking through the meeting area where a charity group was holding a bazaar for the patients, there was Ronnie, waving at me, an aid pushing him through the hallways. The man had spunk. And yet there were many others on that unit who seemed to be fading into its walls: a forty-year-old male swimmer, who during a dive into Lake Michigan hit a rock, spinal cord injury, on a vent, an aid’s flat comment: his wife don’t come at all, and his kids, they rarely visit. One story out of many.

After that rotation, our nursing group gathered for lunch, a quiet celebration because we had made it through. Oak Forest had challenged us. In the ventilator unit and other units of the hospital, we had seen and cared for patients and their particular diagnoses that many of us would never see again. When I look back on my training, the work I have done throughout my career as a maternal-child RN and public health nurse, no one stands out like Ronnie. While other voices have faded, Ronnie’s never does. Maybe he wept in the darkness of his room to get to sleep. Maybe his time was short, and thus he could shoulder through knowing that. The man was brave, and in the few hours I spent with him, he taught me about basic courage. He had discovered that to survive he would be open, would reveal his humanity to caregivers and fellow patients. In the days and months that followed, I no longer looked in those hospital bathroom mirrors—questioning myself. I came to know why I had chosen to work in healthcare. My patients had me and I had them. That’s what patient care truly is—you find some aspect of yourself, some fear, some love, some experience in the men and women you care for. It’s called humanity.