Dancing with a one-legged woman in her underwear
“Hold that thought!” I told my patient.
A throng of people were screaming and shouting down the hall, and coming our way. They all surrounded a patient we all knew all too-well, and none of us liked her.
I was a traveling ER nurse and sometimes worked all 7 days in a week, and this woman was in the ER more often than I was! And always angry and mean and always on…some things. More than one “flavor of the day” for that lady.
My patient was at the end of the hall near the exit, and the screaming and cursing was coming our way. I told him, “Hold that thought!” and started to pull the curtains, but he asked me not to close them all the way: he wanted to watch too!
It’s been a few years. I remember some of the details, but not whether I properly closed the curtains. “To maintain patient privacy.”
Those curtains — in every ER I’ve been in that uses them — are one of the unexplained mysteries of the world! They don’t reach either the floor or the ceiling, they don’t quite reach the end and don’t close in the middle, and they’re not sound-proof…but “somehow” they meet HIPPA compliance for patient privacy!
My generic every-woman name is Francine, and Francine was working her way toward the exit, near my patient and I. She was screaming and swearing at the nurses and maintenance guy who had surrounded her, and they were screaming and swearing at her, and issuing futile orders that she was yelling over and ignoring.
Mental health patients are my favorite flavor of patient! Ever since I was a first responder on the ambulance, I like mental health patients! This one had a tendency to take her leg off and hit people with it, so we generally took her leg away when she entered the ER.
I entered the melee with a smile and stuck my hand out. “Hey, good to see you Francine! How have you been?”
I’m always the weird one. I’m the one NOT yelling and the only one smiling. Because I’m the one who is “out of place,” I usually get the attention. And because I’m weird, it usually takes the patient a moment to adjust and figure things out, since I have just changed the tempo.
People tend to respond in kind, and Francine did. I was smiling and had my hand out, so even though she was puzzled she shook my hand and smiled a toothless, unfriendly smile.
The maintenance guy vanished. He didn’t want to get tapped for “angry psych patient” duty anyway. The other nurses peeled off too, some back to their assignments and a couple to draw up the medications.
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The plan for Francine was that she was going to get some “nap time” meds, right there in the hallway, with the hope that she would wake hours later (and after our shift was over) with a renewed sense of cooperation.
Francine only had one leg, so she was a human pogo stick. She had to hop around and keep moving to keep her balance. So she and I were kinda going in circles as she tried to get to the exit door and I stayed in front of her.
We were going in circles and moving toward the door when I had an idea.
“Did you ever used to like to dance?” I asked her, and that ugly one-legged woman, dressed in that thread-bare fashion icon that we make people wear in the ER, started to cry. Her bottom lip quivered, her angry eyes got big, and then wet.
“I used to love to dance!”
I held out my hands, and she took them. “May I have this dance?” I asked quietly and then her smile really was real and she hopped toward me.
Once upon a time Francine had been a local beauty queen, and then she had been involved in a car crash that had not been her fault, and injured her leg. Following the crash she was introduced to pain meds and eventually graduated to meth. Whether the amputation or the meth came first, I never learned, but when we danced she had had both for many years and whatever glory that woman had used to enjoy had been reduced to shreds of memory and replaced by a life of alcohol, meth and other drugs, and the constant contest of “who is the meanest?”
And then I asked her to dance. Her first dance — and first invitation to dance — in many years.
So we waltzed! We had three legs between the two of us, and we danced one-two-three, one-two-three in grand circles all the way back down the hallway and back into her room. I smiled at the nurses when they returned armed with those meds and needles, and Francine and I danced past them, laughing with each other and at them.
I tucked her into bed with a warm blanket and a cup of ice water and closed her door.
Francine slept the next SEVEN hours, and left before the end of our shift.
For the first time since she had been haunting that ER, Francine left with a smile on her face. She stopped at the nurse’s station as she hobbled past and looked at me and her words were clear.
“Thank you.”
My name is Steve. My working theory is that if we “just pretend” that patients are real people, most of them will act like real people.
