The Making of a Nurse

by Tilda Shalof

  “Can I play soccer later?” he asked after I removed the ice pack.

  “I’m afraid not. No sports for you today.” I wrapped his ankle snugly with a pressure bandage and sized him for a pair of crutches.

  He fell back against the couch. “What am I going to do all day?” he moaned.

  “How about arts and crafts? A deck of cards?” Dare I utter the dreaded word, book?

  He looked at me. “Your childhood must have been so boring.” His eyes filled with pity. “No computers, no cell phones, no video games. What did you do all day?”

  “Well, it was rough.” I stifled a laugh. “There were hardships, but we had great music.”

  “That’s true,” he agreed, and strummed a few bars of “Smoke on the Water” using his tennis racket as an air guitar. They all seemed to be into classic rock ‘n’ roll – Led Zeppelin, The Who, and the Stones – and took great delight in discovering them.

  Next, I saw a little boy who I had been following for a flare-up of eczema. I examined his arms, elbows, and knees. Ouch, I thought, looking at the red and painful-looking rash.

  “Could you please try to be more positive?” he asked me ever so politely. “It helps me if you don’t seem worried when you look at my rash.”

  Touché. Point well taken.

  “Next!”

  But how sick could they be, really? I wondered as I eavesdropped on snippets of their conversations taking place out in the waiting room.

  “Who’s brushing their teeth this week?” a counsellor asked his brood.

  “When are you going on a day off, Jackie?” a little girl asked her counsellor.

  “Tomorrow, sweetie, and I can hardly wait!”

  “When do I get a day off?” her little camper asked, with such wistfulness in her voice.

  “Doggie breath. Is it worse in terriers or poodles?” someone asked, but I didn’t hear the answer.

  “Jasmine, the swim instructor, is so hot!”

  “Yeah, let’s cover her with ketchup and get one of the trippers to lick it off!”

  “Yeah, how ’bout we start a rumour about her and spread it all over camp!”

  “Let’s find two frogs and make them get married.” Two girls were sitting on the floor, playing jacks. I hadn’t ever seen that game played before.

  “My mom’s a forensic pathologist!” one girl told her friend.

  “Mine’s a chiropractor and a video maker,” the other said. “Actually, I have two moms. The other one is a criminal defence lawyer.”

  “What are you into?” Two quiet kids from one of the older cabins struck up a conversation.

  “I’m into cartooning.”

  “Oh, animé?”

  “No, manga.”

  Perhaps the infirmary was the camp “water cooler,” I thought as I taped and iced, bandaged, soothed, cleaned, hugged, examined, and listened.

  OTHER THAN INCLEMENT WEATHER, the only thing that deterred campers from visiting the infirmary was the tuck shop. The two afternoons when tuck (candy) was given out I hid in the office and had time to myself. I hoped I was being sympathetic enough to their complaints, but my work with critically ill patients for so many years had hardened me to life’s common problems. With my own kids, I have always tried to help them deal with life’s discomforts, not avoid them. I want to spare them the pain I’d endured of being overly sensitive. Even as toddlers, if they fell I waited in the wings to see their reaction and went to them only if they called for me. If they needed me, I comforted them, but only then. The joke in my own family was not to bother Mom if a cut is merely bleeding or dripping. My kids know only gushing blood catches my attention.

  The vast majority of kids at camp seemed to be having a wonderful time, but there were a few, just a handful really, who were miserable. Those were the ones whose worried faces I saw over and over again, and all my hugs and words of encouragement weren’t making a bit of difference. Yet, when I brought them into my office, shut the door, sat them down, and gave them my complete attention, it was amazing what came out. They all got up afterward feeling, if not always “cured,” at least better. The listening and paying attention were the treatments themselves. I figured that out when the girl with the “infected” finger came back the next day to show it to me again. “Now, is it infected?” she asked hopefully. I took a quick glance, again said no, and got instantly zapped by her angry face.

  “Come here,” I said more kindly. I took her finger in my hand and brought it, together with her, closer to me and into a light source. I examined her perfectly normal finger, then the other nine, then her hands and arms, and looked into her now-smiling face. Ahh, I get it. She thinks I’m treating her finger, but I’m really attending to her soul.

  I became known as “The Splinter Queen.” I developed a gentle, but sophisticated technique using a twenty-five-gauge needle to “de-roof” the skin over the splinter. If I took the time to examine the patient, scrubbed up like I was about to perform surgery, cleaned the site thoroughly, and distracted the kid with a few jokes, I had those mini-logs extricated in no time. A dab of Polysporin on the spot and I sent them on their way. The Splinter Ceremony became my specialty.

  But there were some kids whom I couldn’t “cure.” They came almost every day to the infirmary with long faces, complaining of stomach aches and headaches, yet later the same day I would see them kicking a soccer ball or climbing a tree. If they caught sight of me walking past, their bright, smiling faces would suddenly droop. Jenny was one of them. Her throat was sore, or her head hurt, and she wanted to go home. I gave her the grape Tylenol until it was all gone, then the orange, then the bubble gum flavour. She confounded me because when I saw her around camp she was playing, dancing, even water-skiing. She had lots of friends, yet the moment she saw me she left them and came over. “I don’t feel well,” she said, her face instantly doleful.

  On a visit to camp, the doctor told me it was called somatizing, displacing and sublimating. “They don’t know how to express their feelings. It’s easier for them to point to a physical discomfort rather than an emotional one. What they want from you is mothering, in the absence of their own mother or father.”

  I had no trouble giving that warm, fuzzy mothering touch to them. I felt for Mitchell and knew he was probably uncomfortable being overweight and unable to keep up with the others. Sarah, the dance instructor, had anxiety and possibly an eating disorder. I was even fond of Greg, the kid with ADD who, despite his daily meds, was still off the wall, loud, and disruptive, but quite endearing. He came in almost daily with minor complaints. When I read in his chart that his father had recently died, I asked him about it.

  “Things happen,” he said like an old, wise man. “Them’s the breaks. But take a look at my toe. Is that gangrene? Do you think you’ll have to amputate?”

  My heart was soft to them all. They were all, myself included, city slicker kids dealing with communal living, bug bites, and food that wasn’t always delicious and like what they ate at home. When they were cold, they didn’t know how to warm themselves or how to get dry when they were wet. They didn’t know how to calm or comfort themselves. They didn’t have a place in their minds where they could go to work things out. They didn’t know how to make themselves feel safe. I understood these things intimately. I had had to learn to calm myself, so that I could be calm for others. I had had to comfort others, even when I felt no comfort. Once again, I sat down to leaf though those health forms to try to understand it all.

  Jenny tends to be lazy, will complain of a stomach ache if she doesn’t want to do something. Will go to the nurse even when there’s nothing wrong. She is not to sleep beside Ellie. Have her bunk beside Michelle … Regarding Ryan’s health: 1) He tends to get rashes. 2) His younger sister died two years ago. He has been dealing with anxiety related to this, and is unwilling to discuss it with anyone. … Catherine has weak sphincter tone. Her poos may come out without warning. I will send lots of extra underwear. Please make sure that she is not teased
because of it … Cheyenne is physically inactive, tends to gain weight at camp. Please weigh her weekly and make sure she doesn’t spend the whole summer reading comic books in the cabin … Trey is a sleepwalker, lower bunk please and vegetarian, too. Has yet to establish close friends at school. Perhaps at camp? … Becky is big for her age, v. well-developed. Prefers to play with boys. She must practise her bat mitzvah portion twice per week, please check … Counsellors, please brush Lianne’s hair every night (she has a lot of curls, but just hang in there, brushing has to be done). And teach her how to ride a bike … Darren has problems with speech articulation and needs to work on body awareness and space issues. Parents divorced, currently not speaking to his father. Occasionally gets migraines and will describe a fizzy, ginger-ale-type feeling in his head, or as if a bug is overtaking his brain.

  Finally, by the end of the second week of camp I was able to match up names with neuroses and faces with fears. And as for the kids with “special needs,” I hardly ever saw them. I waved at the kid in the wheelchair when I spotted her on the tennis court. The autistic kid was doing fine. I finally met the diabetic camper, but only because he came to the infirmary to refill his insulin pump. Those kids loved camp; it was the healthy kids who got sick or were unhappy. They were the ones trawling for drugs, pills, creams, or bandages for any and every deviation from their usual state of well-being.

  Most afternoons, I stuck a note on the door: “Infirmary closed. Nurse on walkie-talkie for emergencies only,” and snuck away. I went for a swim or a walk in the woods. I needed time to sit and think, to read, and take care of myself. Once I swam out to the raft in the middle of the lake and stayed there, treading water. Soon, a crowd gathered on the shore, signalling madly for me to come back. “What’s wrong?” I called out to them.

  “Shannon threw up.”

  They could probably deal with it themselves, but I turned back and headed for shore. It was often difficult to find a quiet moment to myself. Even though there wasn’t a scheduled after-lunch clinic, if I was in the infirmary, sure enough, they would come. I’d be sitting doing paperwork and would hear the porch door open and close and soon they would turn the radio on to a rock station. The air conditioning and my stash of popsicles and Gatorade was irresistible to them. One afternoon, on a beautiful sunny day, the infirmary was filling up. They waited for me, playing rock, paper, scissors, telling jokes, and reading out loud the juicy bits from the sex ed booklets I’d put out for them. That’s it, I’ve had enough. I got up and switched the radio to the CBC.

  “Eww … what is that freakin’ music?” someone said.

  “It sucks big time,” another voice agreed.

  Thank you, Rimsky-Korsakoff, I thought as they fled, screen door banging behind them.

  BY THE END of that second week of camp, we were well into a sweltering heat wave. At breakfast I got up to the podium and launched into a lecture about sunblock, hats, and water bottles. They booed. Yeah, right, they grumbled. Get real.

  The next morning I chose an adorable volunteer, the littlest camper from the youngest group, the Purple Cabin, and spoke into the microphone. “Lucy will demonstrate what to do in this hot weather.” She bounced up to the front of the dining hall. She put on her baseball cap. She unhooked her water bottle from her belt loop and took a long slurp. Everyone clapped. The Turquoise, Maroon, and Silver cabins hooted and whistled. “Woo-hoo! Way to go, Lucy! You rock, girl.”

  I returned to the microphone and waited for the noise to settle down. “If you want to feel well and stay healthy in this heat, let’s see those hats and water bottles. Thank you, Lucy.”

  They clapped and then pressed in a throng all trying to leave the dining room at once.

  “That nurse is mean,” I heard someone say.

  “Yeah, she’s pretty tough.”

  By noon, they started staggering in with flushed faces, headaches, and heat rash.

  “Where’s your hat, your water bottle?” I asked Greg, who usually talked a mile a minute. He looked pale and lethargic.

  “I wasn’t thirsty.” He stretched full out, taking up the entire couch. His lips were dry and cracked. “I don’t like the taste of camp water. At home, I only drink bottled water.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You have to drink, especially in this heat.”

  “I’m not thirsty. I don’t feel good.” He lay there, unmoving. “Water is so not fun to drink.”

  “Here,” I handed him a glass of red Gatorade, “drink this.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  “C’mon, Greg. You need fluids in your system.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Then you leave me no choice.” I picked up a needle, grabbed his arm, and pulled it toward me. I snapped on a rubber tourniquet above the elbow. The other kids looked on, horrified.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” He pulled back, but I hung on tight.

  “I’m looking for a vein to start an intravenous. No one’s getting dehydrated on my watch!”

  “I’ll drink!” he said, chugging down the Gatorade plus a glass of water before bolting out of there.

  Well, I said to myself, that just proves that you can lead a horse to water, and you can make him drink! Yes, I was getting a bad rep. They had even given me a scary nickname: Nursezilla. It came about when I gave a child two tablets for a headache and next thing I heard was “crunch, crunch,” followed by a long wail. I’d forgotten to tell her they weren’t chewables and the bitterness made her retch.

  Jasmine, the pretty swim instructor, was there and laughed. “We’ll have to call you Nursezilla, the nurse from hell.” I must have looked upset because she hastily added, “Just joking. It wasn’t meant as a diss.”

  Yes, I had to control and patrol them, mother and monitor them, nurse and nag them. I was friend, police officer, mommy, rule-maker, and enforcer. I was constantly picking up pieces of expensive clothing left behind at the swim docks, the infirmary, or the dining hall. I would find articles of Gap, Roots, and Banana Republic clothing, most of them with name tags carefully sewn onto them by someone’s parent or, possibly, maid. “Who belongs to this gorgeous Lululemon yoga shirt?” I said in the dining hall, holding up the wrinkled, soiled garment that someone’s parents paid eighty dollars for. “If no one claims it, I’ll enjoy wearing it.” They groaned and laughed me off.

  I knew I didn’t stand a chance of being cool in their eyes, but I disliked the idea of being the nurse from hell. I came up with a plan. I took a drive into the nearby town. At the Giant Tiger – “Your All Canadian Family Discount Store” – I stocked up. Red licorice and Smarties and a bulk-sized bag of Skittles. The green ones would be for homesickness, one to start with, two if it was a severe case. Red ones for headaches and upset stomachs. Yellow for cuts and scrapes, purple for mosquito bites, and orange for whatever ails ya. A bag of lemon-and-honey-flavoured hard candies for the kids with sore throats. I went to the dollar store and bought some decks of cards, a bunch of Archie comics, a plastic game of checkers, and a metallic dart game to keep them busy in the waiting room. I’ll show them who’s the mean nurse. On the way back to camp, I stopped to pick up a few counsellors who were hitchhiking back to camp from town.

  “What did you guys do on your day off?” I asked.

  “Sleep, just sleep,” they said, and to see their refreshed faces, I believed them. Playing is not as easy as it looks. Sleep was a precious commodity at camp and sometimes the infirmary was a hotel where they could crash and catch up on rest. (The time when the Copper cabin of older campers was caught streaking and were sent to the infirmary overnight was meant to be a punishment, to separate them from their cabin mates, but it turned out to be a cure. By morning, they were the most well-rested kids in camp.) Camp went at a frenetic pace and there was little downtime.

  THE CANOE TRIPS were planned for week three. Most kids loved them, but some did everything possible to get out of going. I had been counselling Mitchell and he agreed to give it a try.

  “Ca
mp is about conquering your fears. Learning new things,” Terry said firmly, backing me up. “It’s the reason we don’t let the homesick ones go home, unless the parents insist.”

  They were gone only three days, but when the buses started rolling into camp, bringing them back from Algonquin Park, I eagerly rushed down to greet them. I missed them. I was particularly anxious to see how Mitchell and a few others had managed.

  “I swallowed a live minnow!” hollered Greg, the first one off, leaping from the top step of the bus.

  “Technically speaking, that means he’s not a vegetarian any more!” shouted his buddy.

  “We got to see two frogs getting married!” said the girl who had been looking for that very thing, but her friend corrected her, “I think they were only engaged.”

  They clambered off the bus, messy, dirty, sweaty, smelling of bonfire and looking spotty with mosquito bites and splotchy in areas missed with sunblock, but they were healthy and happy. Standing around in groups, boys and girls together, they were laughing and telling their stories. Even those who had been nervous and reluctant returned to camp triumphant and pleased with themselves.

  The last one off the bus was Mitchell. He came down one step at a time, dragging his knapsack behind him. At the bottom, he stopped and leaned against the bus. I went right over to him. “Mitch, how was it?”

  “Awesome,” he said uneasily, “but I feel bad.”

  “Come with me to the infirmary.”

  His counsellor took me aside. “No offence, Nursezilla, but he stunk up the whole bus. We could barely breathe.”

  I went to get a thermometer and when I returned I knew what the problem was. “Mitchell, do you have diarrhea?”

  “No,” he said. “But my stomach hurts. Could I sleep here tonight?”

  “Yes, if you need to.”

  As I made a bed for Mitchell in a separate room in case what he had was infectious, I went back to him. His stomach was rumbling loudly. “Mitch, there’s the bathroom.”