(no subject)
the death nurse, pg, warning: themes of death and dying. Rose/13th Doctor
Every industry has its slang. Words that stuff years of observation into a few syllables, that reduce people to jagged lines and sharp borders. A lot of times it's stuff people on the outside don't really want to know about for one reason or another. Stuff that reveals corruption, racism, patterns we'd rather not see.
In my industry, there are people we call death nurses. On my unit, that's me.
It doesn't mean what you think.
Outside, the wind is torturing autumn-bright leaves, scattering them to paper the cars still left in the lot. The sun is the sort that gets in yours eyes at three in the afternoon, sharp, even as it sinks weakly toward the horizon.
My patient is young; I don't expect him to make it till morning.
The shadows are long in the world and she means to grow out of one, stick it to her heels with soap and thread until she is solid and it is hers.
I raise the head of the bed a little higher and attach the needle to a syringe of anesthetic. It's just a local so I can remove his breathing tube without causing him pain. He's been on a steady stream of morphine since he was admitted. There's a button on the pump so the patient can control the dose but this John Doe will never push it.
John Smith, he'd told another nurse, barely conscious, when she asked for his name. But it's a good as John Doe, when you get down to it. No information beyond the name given. No family or friends to claim him.
When the tube comes out, the persistent gurgle in his throat rises, the sound growing ominously even as the rest of his body fails. He's worn a scopolamine patch on his neck for the past 24 hours but not even that can fully suppress the death rattle.
Death rattle. That's another one people don't like to hear.
The shape that will be hers was hers and, as she conceives it in her mind, is hers again. She walks with the weight of the living, the weight of a brief life destined to die. Solid pavement slaps the soles of her feet as she walks, once again, down a hard linear edge of time.
You have to be a person of privilege to die with me. Again, it's not quite as twisted as you think.
The hospital I work in has only private rooms. The light is soft, the air is filtered, there's a pianist in the lobby. Rumor has it, John Smith is dying without a friend in sight and with unimaginable funds.
So when I silence the monitors and dim the displays, the room's not as bad as it could be. John grimaces around noisy breaths and I touch his face before pushing a bolus of morphine. It could be minutes now or hours.
When I started this job, my mother insisted I go to Confession every week. You kill people for a living, she said.
But she's wrong. There's no second syringe in my hand, no lethal dose of potassium, no capsules of cyanide. I will not kill John Smith. I will sit with him, I'll ease his pain, I'll wipe his brow. If he wakes and asks me to, I'll pray with him, I'll makes him laugh, I'll help him sleep.
On this unit, I'm the death nurse. I do this better than anyone else.
If he wakes, I'll be the last person he ever sees.
She is always creating, always becoming. The hardest thing now is being one thing at a time. Now small. Now solid. Now breathing. Now opening a door.
His breathing is getting slower when there is movement in the doorway. It's a girl, I think, but she walks closer and instead I think, a woman. “He's dying,” she says, one hand clutching the opposite arm. Her clothes are old-fashioned, her expression protean. I think she is distraught but then the light changes and I think she is uncomfortable in her skin.
“Are you a friend of John's?” I ask because none have shown up in the five days he's been here and he doesn't have any family but someone's cleared her through security.
“Yes,” she says and I expect the pause that says, “I was.” But she blinks and something settles in her. She draws a breath and looks briefly toward the setting sun.
“What's your name?” I ask gently.
There's something indulgent in her smile. “Rose Tyler.” I have the strangest sense of … for a moment I feel holy.
“Rose, has anyone told you what's happened?”
“An accident, looks like,” she surmises, hands resting on a side rail.
This is my part too: to take pressors and fluids and failing kidneys, heart rhythms and brain waves and outside chances and make them into something terrible and understandable and real. “An auto accident we think.” I said. “He lost consciousness soon after he came to us. We gave him a tube to help him breathe, repaired what injuries we could. He woke up once, just long enough to show us he has a DNR. Had been carrying it on him the whole time ….”
“Let me guess,” Rose says with a tiny smile, “in a little leather book like a passport.”
“Yes,” I say, realizing she must know him too well. “He didn't want to be kept alive on machines,” I am gentle but firm. “So we've removed the tube.”
Rose nods. “No one's been to see him.” It's not a question or a guess.
I offer politeness anyway. “We weren't sure who to contact.”
But Rose shakes her head. “It's how it should be. Going out just like we come in, unknown, alone but for the people who love us already, without knowing why.”
“You stay with them,” she says and her eyes don't cut through me and see to some buried center of truth, no. They grow. They grow and I grow and still I am surrounded by her gaze. She's always known me and I've always been a part of her. “You see the ends of things. As beautiful as birth, in its own way.”
I nod and surprise myself with the ability to speak. “My privilege, ma'am.”
She places a kiss on John's forehead. “He's so young this time,” she says. “Always doing things backward.”
Rose straightens and turns away from the bed. “You'll stay with him?”
“Yes.” And so often they can't bear to stay and so it often it falls to me and yet …. “You won't?”
She smiles. “I always have.”
It's not right to say that she fades with the light. It's not right to think that she leaves. She is all things and all times and if, for a moment, she turned her back on all for the sake of one man, it is only right to say she returns.
It's another hour more before John Smith's breaths grow slow then loud then final. The world is more broken and more whole. I touch the still face, the wild, ginger hair.
This is what I do.
On my unit, I am the death nurse.
It doesn't mean what I thought.
Every industry has its slang. Words that stuff years of observation into a few syllables, that reduce people to jagged lines and sharp borders. A lot of times it's stuff people on the outside don't really want to know about for one reason or another. Stuff that reveals corruption, racism, patterns we'd rather not see.
In my industry, there are people we call death nurses. On my unit, that's me.
It doesn't mean what you think.
Outside, the wind is torturing autumn-bright leaves, scattering them to paper the cars still left in the lot. The sun is the sort that gets in yours eyes at three in the afternoon, sharp, even as it sinks weakly toward the horizon.
My patient is young; I don't expect him to make it till morning.
The shadows are long in the world and she means to grow out of one, stick it to her heels with soap and thread until she is solid and it is hers.
I raise the head of the bed a little higher and attach the needle to a syringe of anesthetic. It's just a local so I can remove his breathing tube without causing him pain. He's been on a steady stream of morphine since he was admitted. There's a button on the pump so the patient can control the dose but this John Doe will never push it.
John Smith, he'd told another nurse, barely conscious, when she asked for his name. But it's a good as John Doe, when you get down to it. No information beyond the name given. No family or friends to claim him.
When the tube comes out, the persistent gurgle in his throat rises, the sound growing ominously even as the rest of his body fails. He's worn a scopolamine patch on his neck for the past 24 hours but not even that can fully suppress the death rattle.
Death rattle. That's another one people don't like to hear.
The shape that will be hers was hers and, as she conceives it in her mind, is hers again. She walks with the weight of the living, the weight of a brief life destined to die. Solid pavement slaps the soles of her feet as she walks, once again, down a hard linear edge of time.
You have to be a person of privilege to die with me. Again, it's not quite as twisted as you think.
The hospital I work in has only private rooms. The light is soft, the air is filtered, there's a pianist in the lobby. Rumor has it, John Smith is dying without a friend in sight and with unimaginable funds.
So when I silence the monitors and dim the displays, the room's not as bad as it could be. John grimaces around noisy breaths and I touch his face before pushing a bolus of morphine. It could be minutes now or hours.
When I started this job, my mother insisted I go to Confession every week. You kill people for a living, she said.
But she's wrong. There's no second syringe in my hand, no lethal dose of potassium, no capsules of cyanide. I will not kill John Smith. I will sit with him, I'll ease his pain, I'll wipe his brow. If he wakes and asks me to, I'll pray with him, I'll makes him laugh, I'll help him sleep.
On this unit, I'm the death nurse. I do this better than anyone else.
If he wakes, I'll be the last person he ever sees.
She is always creating, always becoming. The hardest thing now is being one thing at a time. Now small. Now solid. Now breathing. Now opening a door.
His breathing is getting slower when there is movement in the doorway. It's a girl, I think, but she walks closer and instead I think, a woman. “He's dying,” she says, one hand clutching the opposite arm. Her clothes are old-fashioned, her expression protean. I think she is distraught but then the light changes and I think she is uncomfortable in her skin.
“Are you a friend of John's?” I ask because none have shown up in the five days he's been here and he doesn't have any family but someone's cleared her through security.
“Yes,” she says and I expect the pause that says, “I was.” But she blinks and something settles in her. She draws a breath and looks briefly toward the setting sun.
“What's your name?” I ask gently.
There's something indulgent in her smile. “Rose Tyler.” I have the strangest sense of … for a moment I feel holy.
“Rose, has anyone told you what's happened?”
“An accident, looks like,” she surmises, hands resting on a side rail.
This is my part too: to take pressors and fluids and failing kidneys, heart rhythms and brain waves and outside chances and make them into something terrible and understandable and real. “An auto accident we think.” I said. “He lost consciousness soon after he came to us. We gave him a tube to help him breathe, repaired what injuries we could. He woke up once, just long enough to show us he has a DNR. Had been carrying it on him the whole time ….”
“Let me guess,” Rose says with a tiny smile, “in a little leather book like a passport.”
“Yes,” I say, realizing she must know him too well. “He didn't want to be kept alive on machines,” I am gentle but firm. “So we've removed the tube.”
Rose nods. “No one's been to see him.” It's not a question or a guess.
I offer politeness anyway. “We weren't sure who to contact.”
But Rose shakes her head. “It's how it should be. Going out just like we come in, unknown, alone but for the people who love us already, without knowing why.”
“You stay with them,” she says and her eyes don't cut through me and see to some buried center of truth, no. They grow. They grow and I grow and still I am surrounded by her gaze. She's always known me and I've always been a part of her. “You see the ends of things. As beautiful as birth, in its own way.”
I nod and surprise myself with the ability to speak. “My privilege, ma'am.”
She places a kiss on John's forehead. “He's so young this time,” she says. “Always doing things backward.”
Rose straightens and turns away from the bed. “You'll stay with him?”
“Yes.” And so often they can't bear to stay and so it often it falls to me and yet …. “You won't?”
She smiles. “I always have.”
It's not right to say that she fades with the light. It's not right to think that she leaves. She is all things and all times and if, for a moment, she turned her back on all for the sake of one man, it is only right to say she returns.
It's another hour more before John Smith's breaths grow slow then loud then final. The world is more broken and more whole. I touch the still face, the wild, ginger hair.
This is what I do.
On my unit, I am the death nurse.
It doesn't mean what I thought.