Formica Island
What We Lost When the Pod Was Gone
Most of the nurses were skeptical about the new tower. We watched the old one torn down floor by floor, men in hard hats wrestling with twisted metal, mechanical jaws loading dumpster after dumpster and lowering them down. Light leaked into hospital windows that hadn’t had a view of the park since 1965.
As soon as the last bit of rubble was cleared away, concrete foundations were poured for the next great thing. A crude mockup of our future state-of-the-art ICU hung sideways on the bulletin board in the breakroom. No preamble or explanation attached — just an arrow drawn in dry erase marker and two words: NEW UNIT! It would be years before we’d step into that new building, but as soon as I saw the layout I knew — something wasn’t right.
There was no centralized nurses’ station. Instead, there were long hallways with solitary computers crammed in between doorways.
More than one of us tried to warn them. We had experience with that layout. An errant arm of rooms snaked past the circle on our current unit. We called it “the hole.” The two nurses in the hole were unwittingly neglected by the techs and often forgotten when the charge nurse came around to let everyone know, “Free cookies in the breakroom from bed 12’s family!”
The new unit was a conglomeration of holes, each one marooned on a tiny Formica island. Instead of peeking your head out of your room in an attempt to catch the averted eyes of your podmates — sighing and laughing and dragging their feet to help you clean up the shit river in your patient’s room for the fourth time — there was a wall and an empty, grey corridor.
Instead of multiple sets of eyes on the clearly visible line of monitors, noticing the little things before the alarms even ring — Is your swan in the RV? Has your guy been in afib all day? — there’s one screen scrolling all the heart rates, a chaotic jumble of waveforms, mounted on the wall behind our heads. The alarms never stop ringing.
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But the Dopplers were new, the scanners all worked, and the rolling chairs zoomed smooth — no hair clogging their wheels.
Turns out new isn’t what really mattered.
Last year, our unit won an award for excellent teamwork; we were all given a pin to stick on our badges. I rolled my eyes and never wore mine, but I liked knowing we had this unspoken thing that made us great.
I’ve never truly dreaded going to work — not even during COVID — until now. Before the new tower, I always knew there’d be someone in my pod who’d have my back. Even if you had the worst assignment or the sickest patient, you’d have maybe two, three, or four other people who’d pitch in — even if the third was a hot mess who never had their own charting done before 4 p.m. — they’d still drop everything to help.
They’re giving us sensors that clip onto our badges to track where we walk. Our faces and job titles will project onto the oversized TV screen when we enter a room. I still wear my hospital-branded t-shirt they gave us for Nurses Week — Together We’re Extraordinary!— although now it feels like the punchline to a joke I wasn’t in on.
I swivel in the slick, black chairs and squint at monitors that are too far away. Instead of someone running to the cafeteria to get “pod snacks,” I eat an entire box of sour rainbow ribbons at my computer alone. There’s granulated sugar covering my lap, and I need help with a turn, but there’s no one in sight. They say if we need assistance, all we have to do is send an SOS! through the cumbersome app on our phones.
I’d rather walk to find someone. I frown at the uplifting floral wall art as I pass, and begrudgingly appreciate the giant floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the park. The sun is setting on the freshly installed rooftop garden — I haven’t had time to visit.
I meander past 17 of the 28 beds, fail to find a tech, and get lost trying to get back to my patient’s room. I curse the architects, executives, administrators, and whoever thought decentralized nursing stations made employees more efficient.
Back at my desk, I rage-click the “internal job openings” hyperlink and start scrolling, because pretending I’d leave is the only weapon I have. The walls aren’t going to rearrange themselves. The pod isn’t getting back together.
I picture the daisy-shaped pin in my junk drawer at home.
Now I wish I had it.
