Broken: A story of hope and forgiveness

by Kevin Mark Smith

  Chapter 10

  Blankenship’s Bedside Manner

  It was a disturbing conversation; they always were. Dr. Niles Blankenship was chief resident of the trauma unit of Oklahoma City Memorial Hospital, the only full-service public-funded hospital in the state. He had just spoken with Robert Baxter’s hysterical mother, telling her that her son was in a coma and might never wake up.

  Blankenship was one of the brightest graduates of his class at John Hopkins University School of Medicine—the best of the best. However, he had a horrific bedside manner. And he didn’t see a problem with that. Indeed, he believed that physicians who coddled patients and family members were doing a disservice by not being totally honest. They gave patients false hope that only led to more heartache when the truth came out, he often said. It was also a sure way, he believed, to get sued by greedy trial lawyers—false hopes followed by death led to the logical conclusion that someone screwed up, at least in the mind of the typical ambulance-chasing lawyer.

  Kristen Evans, RN, head nurse for the shift on duty at the time, heard every word of Blankenship’s cold-hearted assessment. She disagreed with Blankenship’s philosophy, and she had reason to disagree. It was the nurses, after all, who had to hold the hands, pray with, and console patients and loved ones left in the wake of his calloused attitude. Yet sadly, she had observed he wasn’t the only doctor to follow such a disconnected, cold-hearted philosophy. Many of the other physicians at Memorial did the same thing, though most were older and had stopped caring only after seeing many of their patients die regardless of their efforts. So many condolences to pass on and so many times of bearing the weight of responsibility of losing their patients in spite of their best efforts had hardened their hearts. Kristen cringed at the thought of where the fairly youthful, cocky types like Blankenship would go after such disappointment. They were already hard; disappointment would only make her job that much more difficult and the heartache of loved ones and patients that much deeper. She shook her head as Blankenship walked away from the nurses’ station and toward yet another room and another soon-to-be traumatized, deeply depressed patient. She wondered if his care left them better or worse at the end of the day, physical healing notwithstanding.

  “I’m taking a break,” she told one of her subordinates, a rookie nurse just slightly younger than she was, as she walked away from the station and toward the elevators a dozen or so feet away.

  “Could you bring me back a bottle of water?” Jasmine, a cute and petite blond responded.

  “Sure,” Kristen replied as she punched the down button and waited only a couple of seconds for one of the elevators to ding its arrival.

  She walked into the elevator, pushed the first-floor button and watched the doors slide shut. No one else was on the elevator with her, so she let out a sigh and leaned against the back wall.

  “God,” she exclaimed aloud with her eyes closed, exhaustion manifest on her face through her baggy eyes and drooping lips. “Please help me through this day. Amen.”

  Lately, most of her prayers were as short as the one she had just prayed, as the days grew longer and more burdensome. It wasn’t just her new duties as head nurse, which had begun only two weeks before; she also had to deal with her job as a single mom of a teenage son, Adam. The adolescent headaches he caused her were almost as difficult as the ones she got from coddling obnoxious doctors and headstrong nurses. Fortunately, Adam wasn’t any more difficult than the average teenager, and he was at least capable of raising himself when she wasn’t around, a much welcomed change to the juggling she used to do before he got his driver’s license.

  After four floors passed, another ding of the elevator announced the approach of the first floor lobby, only a short distance from the cafeteria, which was an equal distance from the outside smokers’ pit where non-health conscious doctors, nurses, and other staff members gathered to blow off steam and relax the old-fashioned way. Ironically, the smoking docs had better attitudes; she wondered if there was a connection. As the head nurse of her shift, Kristen knew she had just enough time to smoke an entire cigarette, drink a small cup of coffee, and return to the trauma floor with bottled water in hand. Before she was promoted, she had been lucky to finish half a cigarette in the smokers’ pit before she downed the rest of her coffee on the way back to her floor.

  As she lit up, Kristen wondered, as she regularly did, how long her faith in God would permit her to continue her self-destructive smoking habit. There are worse habits, she rationalized, as she considered Blankenship’s annoying devotion to his herbal tea habit and warped sense of compassion. After all, what good are healthy habits if the person is morally and spiritually corrupt?

  She walked the hallways to the cafeteria and through the welcoming double-wide doors that were propped open and approached the coffee and drink station to buy her coffee and Jasmine’s bottled water. It was self-serve so she grabbed a small Styrofoam cup and filled it to the brim, pulled a bottle of water out of an ice tub next to the condiment area, and walked to the cashier. After paying for the drinks, she walked out into the smoking area, sat the drinks on a ledge next to a couple of male colleagues, and lit up a Marlboro non-filtered cigarette.

  “What a day,” she sighed toward two colleagues, one smoking and the other just standing there drinking a soda.

  “How are things in trauma?” Six-foot-tall Vincent, an effeminate, slightly built Hispanic male nurse asked as he cradled his own cigarette, limp-wristed, while flicking an ash to the side. Waiting for an answer, he grabbed his own coffee cup off the ledge to take a sip with his free hand.

  “Unbearable,” she said, glad at the opportunity to vent her frustrations. “Some of these surgeons are so arrogant I’m beside myself. I’m not sure I can bite my tongue much longer. And it’s tons worse as a supervisor; I have to nod yes and smile a lot.”

  “Sister,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years and it doesn’t get any easier. Just be thankful you get paid more to suck up to the blowhards than me.”

  They chuckled and took another feverish puff on their smokes. Jackson, an African-American male nurse slightly shorter yet more stout than Vincent, nodded along with them. “Who’s the latest snob?” he asked in a deep, almost booming voice that seriously clashed with his light blue nursing scrubs.

  “Blankenship.”

  The men looked at each and then rolled their eyes, the nods of agreement becoming more vigorous. “Tell me about it,” Vincent gasped. “He is terrible. I worked with him when I was in trauma and I can’t stand him. He’s God’s gift to medicine, so he thinks.”

  Still nodding, Jackson said, “I worked with him, too, a couple of years ago. I think he lost his wife or something. He didn’t used to be that way, at least that’s what Megan told me.”

  Kristen chuckled a little and sighed in disbelief, drawing another hit off her cigarette. Jackson continued, “Their families are pretty close; neighbors for years. According to her, he married his high school sweetheart while in college, and both went with him to medical school. Right before graduation, she was killed in a car wreck.”

  “That’s terrible,” Vincent replied, shaking his head and frowning, feeling bad that he’d thought such terrible things about the man, things not worth repeating. “Sometimes you can’t know a person until you walk in his shoes.”

  “Yeah,” Jackson agreed. “From then on, he became all business and shut himself off from everything and everyone. I guess he prefers the shield of his ‘calling’ to any real human contact.”

  “So Megan says,” Kristen replied. “But I still have a hard time believing he was ever human.”

  Jackson stopped talking, wondering whether Kristen had heard anything he’d just said. He just sipped his coffee and watched the other two smoke their cigarettes. A few moments of silence passed. He then felt compelled to say something. “Y’all ever read the Bible?”

  Vincent was stunned by the question. His childhood memories—adoles
cent memories, mostly—about church, God, and all things religious were bad, very bad. In fact, when he broke the news to his mom that he was gay, she turned her back on him and told him that there was a special place in hell for the likes of him. He was still haunted by her words, even several years after her death. Kristen was also a bit shocked, though for a very different reason. She went to church, and her son was very involved, yet for her it was about timing. There was a time and place for God, and this moment provided neither. She knew what Vincent thought about the subject; she had even invited him to church once, only to be chastised for being judgmental.

  Vincent replied, “A time or two. Why do you ask?” He punctuated the question with a stare and a reddening of his cheeks.

  Kristen said nothing, choosing instead to just nod in support of Vincent, recalling his reply to her invitation.

  “It talks about judging others,” he said. “Jesus said we shouldn’t do it, since we’re probably not as good as we think we are. Ever hear that verse where he asks something like ‘Why do you see a see a speck in someone else’s eye but you don’t even notice the huge plank in your own?’ Doc’s not a bad guy, he’s just hurting, been hurting for a long time.” Jackson gazed down to the ground and slowly shook his head back and forth. “I can’t imagine what I’d do if I lost my Mindy. The thought of living without her is impossible to imagine.”

  He looked back up at his colleagues, and said to both, “Did you know that he hasn’t so much as looked at another woman since she died?”

  Kristen felt bad—terrible, actually—but tried to hang on to her bad thoughts about Blankenship’s attitude. Deep inside, though, slowly creeping up to the surface, she had a feeling that Jackson was right. She still hated the way Blankenship treated people, but she couldn’t say for certain that she wouldn’t act the same way if she had been through what he had. Indeed, her divorce had almost turned her into a bitter, angry person. But for God, she knew that everything about her would’ve been different: No nursing school (too distraught and angry to study), rebellious son (no firm spiritual grounding to smooth out the rough spots of growing up), and who knows what other detrimental side effects of losing the man she loved would have occurred? And she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Blankenship did not know God; indeed, he dismissed any thought of a Supreme Being who would allow his wife to die and leave him alone and hurting. If he did believe in God, she knew, he likely hated Him to the core of his being.

  Vincent knew Jackson was right too, though he had little sympathy for the man. As far as he was concerned, his lifestyle choice subjected him to enough ridicule and harassment to generate almost as much heartbreak as Blankenship had been through. Where was the compassion he needed?

  PART II

  When the morning’s freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles quiver under the strain, the climb seems endless, and, suddenly, nothing will go quite as you wish—it is then that you must not hesitate.

  —Dag Hammarskjöld