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CHAPTER 1
Nursing 101
Silver scissors glistened, the fluted jewel of a nursing pin nestled against her breast. I was restless,
three seats forward. She hushed us, a hiss of cotton against silk,
I learned how cells collide then meld and peel into spheres,
until my hands rang with grace. I learned the quick save:
waited, flicking his bright cigarette, the burning eye that led me,
thick as grief. Where the night nurse moved in my favorite dance —
Selling Kisses at the Diner
It was my second year, my wild year.
would pick me up after work, take me to an all-night diner where mostly old men lingered —
the homeless, the widowers, the boozers trying to get straight.
me in my proud uniform, white stockings, and Clinic shoes,
The old men would sing to me, I'll give you a dollar for a kiss,
as if I were Florence Nightingale or little sister to the hookers who loitered outside the diner door. And yet,
pausing here and there to press my lips to those sad lives,
Mornings We Rolled Pills into Fluted Cups
Mornings we rolled pills into fluted cups prim as our caps. We warmed the vial, felt
the resistance of flesh against the needle.
thin as paper, washed young men, all over,
up the spine, down to buttocks.
Hands meeting, heads touching, we hoisted like farmers. Two nurses
make a bed, hands hiding where the sheets tuck.
Plastic sheets cover the dead — skin gets mottled in fifteen minutes, cold to touch.
The death stretcher's hard to push,
We held hands with mourners, leaned our bodies against old men, stood while hands clutched our waists,
pressed our hands on chests, to revive. We laughed on the way to the morgue, to survive.
Surgical Rotation
He was the first, first death, first cold palm on my heart, hand of frost, pulse of fear, he was only thirty-five, his wife waiting in the family area, he was in for a nothing surgery, bunion of all things, knobby growth not cancer not tumor, the anesthesiologist gave him the sleepy juice, the patient went out easy, surgery progressed, skin cut, bone rasp snips and grinding, nothing, then the gas man gave a little uh and the surgeon looked up, we all looked up, BP tanking, then the storm dam burst, spewed panic like ice circulating nurse she hit the button and all hell broke, docs and residents running, me flat against the wall, held breath, bam bam code cart, sparks and the flash of needles, blood stink, names of meds in my ears like static, like shiny wires screeching, then absolute hush, blank eyes, death like a building fell, death dust rose and settled, everything quiet and gritty, everyone with their particular duty, nurses here, there the senior resident given the task, long walk to the waiting room, speaking the wife's name in his Bombay lilt, her scream shot all the way back to OR 3 where I stood struck dumb, enthralled, all of me bright with this hard desire, let this be, let this be, let this be my life's work.
The Nurse's First Autopsy
The senior students said, don't look at the face.
This was a test: weaker girls who fainted were dismissed. I held my place,
while I observed the race between two residents who cut their corpses neatly and with grace.
sank in stainless bowls. Blood,
this patient did when living, and yet,
to care for but not about. Out came bone from flesh,
Apology to the Woman in Room 23
radioactive isotopes inserted into the body may prevent the recurrence of cancer
The cylinder didn't glow blue,
One nurse in the room for only five minutes,
and we couldn't stand too near her bed where the invisible ions beamed a deadly zone we could not cross.
In spite of this, she managed a dreamy look as we sprinted in like a relay team offering a piecemeal bath.
Once we had to bribe the aide to fill the patient's glass with ice. She took long sips, cold cubes crashing down the tumbler
to her mouth. All the while,
In three days she'd grown so weak the doctors gloved and gowned in aluminum suits and pulled the spent rod out.
An orderly locked it in a little vault with six-inch walls and hauled it off to God-knows-where.
We watched it roll away. The doctors said we were safe,
We talked fast.
Stoned
Marion asked for grass. You know, she said. It's true.
Her friends brought in an ounce,
I'd assign a nurse to help.
Smell that? she asked.
You must be used to it, she laughed, the smell of death.
behind the pungent smoke, a scent slightly off, a little edge to it, like old perfume.
We didn't speak.
everyone was turned and turned again, to keep skin from breaking down where ribs and bones
poked through, and all the patients' wounds were bound.
as we nurses with our flimsy cures pushed every chair against her door
to keep death out. And when we couldn't,
Intubating the Corpse
We try to hold them back,
how our patient died.
One takes the steel laryngoscope and pries it in until the light
finds the woman's vocal cords.
between the cords, and another tries,
slides and lodges in. Others wait their turns,
while we make frantic calls to those in charge,
Finally, we tire, lean with crossed arms against the wall, the curtains drawn
to hide this scene from passersby. Nurses watch, and speak only with their eyes.
Angel of Mercy
She has seen the artificial eye afloat in a glass and the wig in the bald lady's room. Undisturbed,
she directs her flashlight beam onto each sleeping face.
bland curtains hanging, nurses' voices like a mother's distant
She wipes her hands on her skirts, enters the room of her
He drifts to the blink-tap of pumps, the syncope of bellows.
wormed through his lids. She bends to kiss his lips,
hoists him like a sack. He dreams his boat is rocked by waves.
Doctors hurry into the room, flail the boy until he is blue and
Down the hall, limping, out of breath, the Angel runs, her
Falling Temperature
The temperature is falling,
I think of temperature and how it climbs higher than you'd think, the human tongue a bed of coals.
Frosty and mechanical,
plunge fast or else creep down so slowly we can't save the memory,
Even our words are hot: crisis, defervescence, hyperthermia.
behind their eyes, how they flush and feel a desert in their veins, believing they might burn like paper.
Better off dead, a woman told me,
wading in the Amazon.
Crispy Critters — that's what nurses call the burned kids, their bodies hot,
you want to prick them with a needle,
and wrap them tight in gauze until their body heat drops too low to register. Like tonight,
when, they say, the temperature is sure to fall.
All Night, Lightning Flared Silently
All night, lightning flared silently then, a minute later,
The bedroom window was hard to open, the neighbor's trees blue, waiting. Finally,
In the room, my father's harsh breath drawn in only partially,
By late morning, the sun was sharp.
What memories do we take with us when we go from here?
then the sound of a faraway flight.
of the rain, of the long, terrible night,
Heroics
A slight tremor on the monitor or a waver in the complex signified a restless patient.
Behind drawn curtains, I'd touch the patient's body silvered by the IV bottle's light. Are you
all right? I'd ask, and watch the bedside screen's silent sweep, searching for PVCs, SVT,
or the rare run of ventricular fib, the snake at Eden's gate. If the heart's undulating line
went flat, triggering a high-pitched whine that wouldn't stop, we'd slather the metallic paddles
like two cold palms and snug them tight.
heaved and wobbled on.
across the chart to show where the patient died,
to the saved man sing and watch his heart's line burn —
Teaching CPR
First, shake my shoulders, shout Annie, Annie!
Women's Clinic
She digs calloused heels into the stirrups. Under the sheets, her legs jut up like ghosts.
I aim the focused glow of light between the patient's knees —
like a strand of knotted pearls,
Next patient is a skinny girl,
My hand inside finds the hard rim of the baby ten weeks along, and the mother,
raving, This is all I need!
Now a girl with earrings round as moons,
found inviting once too often.
Outside, other nervous girls are waiting.
The Dark Marks
When I go to wash my lab coats,
We're all stained: doctors in surgery, residents in their scrubs, nurses holding the newly born.
No matter the clean hair, the perfumed neck,
mouths and hands and bodies glorious,
Hooked Up
Drunk, partying, she and the man just hooked up
Alchemy
The sixteen-year-old with dark eyes slouches on the exam table,
Her mother sits straight in her chair and tells the daughter,
catches a breath. Does the mother remember what it was like before the first flutter, before the belly grew?
The mother cries, and we think she might strike her daughter.
Then she becomes lean, slides off the table, becomes a wolf.
None of us try to guess what will happen. The mother does love her daughter; the daughter loves
her unborn child. At night, howling winds will keep them awake.
The waiting room is crowded. Little girls with newborn babies,
The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room
Let her not be blinded by the glare of the spotlight or distracted by the tangle of plastic tubes,
the stink of anesthesia waiting in its multichambered monolith of sleep. Let her stand beside her patients
and look into their eyes. Let her say, we will take care of you.
Let her secure her mask and turn to the counting and opening,
tap a surgeon's shoulder, watch it, if he seems on the edge of contamination. Let the cutting and suturing go well.
Let the blood that saturates the gauze be red; let the organs be glassy and pink; let the sickness be lifted out
and taken away in a stainless steel bowl. Let her patients awake,
and the linens be white. Let the patients be lifted from the thin table, waving good-bye, good-bye
as they are taken to recovery, where other nurses wait with oxygen, with warm blankets, with eager hands.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Taking Care of Time"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Cortney Davis.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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