by Kerr, Jean;
Operation operation
Obviously this is not the moment to be talking about operations when here we all are—in the very bloom of health. But these are troubled times, and there are people in St. Vincent’s Hospital today who, as recently as yesterday, didn’t know they had a spinal disk. The thing to do, I say, is be prepared, bone up, get the facts so that your stay in the hospital will be the jolly, satisfying interlude it ought to be.
I don’t know whether or not I am speaking for convalescents everywhere, but I can tell you that my big mistake when I go to the hospital is being too cheerful. I arrive the day before the operation and, while it would be stretching things to suggest that on this occasion I feel fit, I at least feel human. So I try to be agreeable. Agreeable nothing; I’m adorable to a point just short of nausea. With my gay sayings and my air of quiet self-deprecation, I creep into the heart of one and all.
“Yes,” I murmur to the night nurse, “I did ring for you an hour ago, but that’s perfectly all right.” And I reassure the orderly who forgot to bring my dinner tray with a blithe “Don’t worry about it, I’m not the least bit hungry and besides I have these delicious cherry cough drops.”
But then the morrow comes, and with it my operation. As I’m wheeled back from the Recovery Room it becomes absolutely clear that, while the operation was a great success, I am a total failure. I feel completely, utterly, unspeakably miserable, and I see no reason why any member of the staff should be kept in ignorance of this sorry state of affairs. I ring bells, buzz buzzers, snap at nurses, and generally behave in a manner that can best be described as loathsome.
Of course, the nurses have seen post-operative cases before, but clearly they expected more of me. It’s as though June Allyson had been transformed into Ana Pauker right before their eyes. And they feel, not unreasonably, that they have been betrayed. As a result, the whole staff gives me approximately the same brisk, gingerly attention they would bestow on an old bandage. Even at the end of the fourth day—when I’m once again feeling pro-social and want to kiss and make up—they will have none of me.
The best solution to this problem, short of being a good little soldier all the time, is to be a teensy bit curt when you first arrive. Don’t pose as an Eva Marie Saint. Show your true colors. Keep your tone brisk. Then there will be no unpleasant shocks later.
And there are other steps you can take. Actually, to cope with ordinary hospital routine you really ought to be in good physical condition. Since this is hardly practical—you wouldn’t be in the hospital if you were in good physical condition—you can do the next best thing: be mentally alert, be systematic. Remember: if they have rules, you have rules.
Rule One: Refuse to be bullied. It is the custom in most hospitals for the night nurse to wake all her patients before she goes off duty at six o’clock in the morning and present each of them with a basin of lukewarm water and a bar of soap. Then, a few seconds later, the incoming day nurse rushes in and takes everybody’s temperature. This is a very sensible procedure because most people say they notice a very definite rise in temperature (together with a tendency to break down and sob) merely at being required to look at a basin of water at six o’clock in the morning, and the day nurse now has something concrete to put on her chart. She doesn’t have to feel a failure.
How do you eliminate this dawn patrol? It’s no use complaining to the nurse; she’s met your type before. Any piteous explanations on your part like, “Nurse, please, I haven’t been to sleep at all, they just gave me a sedative half an hour ago and besides I’m clean, look, clean!” will only confirm her growing suspicion that you have no team spirit and, what’s worse, no regard at all for personal daintiness.
After much trial and error I have worked out a rather neat little system for beating this game. I simply explain to the nurse that I am undergoing psychoanalysis for an old guilt trauma which dates back to the time when I was three years old and shoved my little sister into a golf bag. Ever since, I tell her, I’ve shown manifestations of the Lady Macbeth complex, an aberration in which the victim has a continuous and compulsive desire to wash her hands. Consequently, as a part of my therapy I am forbidden by my analyst to wash more than three times a day.
I am also working on a plan—it’s unfortunately still in the blueprint stage—that would limit the number of times a nurse took your temperature to something reasonable, say eight or nine times in a single afternoon. At that, it’s not really the frequency that’s so maddening, it’s the duration. What do you suppose there is in the Nightingale code that impels a nurse to put a thermometer in somebody’s mouth just before she goes off to assist at an appendectomy? There you are, left like a beached submarine with this little periscope poking from your mouth while all about you life goes on, children are born, and you who have so much to contribute can do nothing but nibble on that damn little glass tube.
I just take it out the minute her back is turned and carefully replace it about five minutes before she returns. There’s no real risk of detection, because a truly conscientious nurse will always stop off at the linen closet on her way back and her approach will be heralded by the snatches of fascinating dialogue that float down the corridors:
“Listen, fourteen needs a top sheet.”
“Nonsense, I gave fourteen two sheets yesterday.”
“Okay, you tell that to fourteen.”
The system is practically foolproof.
Rule Two: Act your age. One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is the assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind. Personally, I find it rather piquant to be treated like a four-year-old. (“Are we feeling any better? Shall we sit up and eat our nice lunch?”) The only objectionable aspect of this constant use of the plural is that it leaves me with the feeling that I’m two four-year-olds.
And you do have to say one thing for these cuddly, nursy-knows-best disciplinarians: they’re loyal, they complete the task assigned. Neither storm nor sleet nor gloom of night will stay them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. This was brought home to me in a very real way during my last sojourn in the hospital when a dear little night nurse woke me from a sound sleep to give me a sleeping pill. Sometimes this business of hewing to the narrow line of duty produces results bordering on the miraculous. A writer I once heard about flew to Evanston to visit his eighty-year-old mother who had just had an operation. Arriving, he met a nurse in the corridor, asked for a report on the patient, and was told that she had made all the routine objections to being put on her feet five days after the operation but that the staff had been firm, quite firm, and now the old lady was trotting around like everybody else. The writer was deeply impressed. “Good Lord,” he said, “she hasn’t walked in five years.”
You see the point, don’t you? If the lady in question had stood on her rights as an eighty-year-old, she’d still be sitting pretty in that rocking chair, where she wanted to be.
Rule Three: Get the facts. It seems to me that too many people accept hospital routine with cowlike apathy, whereas a little intellectual curiosity would be broadening to the patient and stimulating to the staff. Let’s say that two interns approach you with a cartful of sinister-looking tubes and announce casually, “We’re going to give you a Harris Flush.”
Don’t just lie there. Get the whole story. Who was Harris? What is this flush? When did Harris get the idea in the first place? Whatever happened to Harris?
Why shouldn’t you ask a question from time to time? It’s only quid pro quo. From the moment you get into that hospital coat and they lock away your shoes, there is a constant parade of cheery interns, all of them popping with more questions than Mary Margaret McBride. What was your mother’s maiden name? Did you ever have any broken limbs? How old were you when you had chicken pox? If there is anything more striking than their fascination with that attack of measles you had in 1927, it’s their total disinterest in that ruptured appendix which expla
ins your presence here at this moment.
My father spent some time in a hospital a couple of years ago, and he began by being very patient and cooperative about answering all the routine questions. At the end of an hour’s inquisition the intern asked him how old his father was when he died. Dad explained, with pardonable pride, that his father had died at the age of ninety-five. The intern looked up from his notes and inquired, with the air of one about to make a significant discovery, “What did he die of?” Whereupon my father exploded. “My God, man, he died because he was ninety-five!”
While interns may be lacking in other qualities, I want no one to tell me that they don’t have a sense of humor. At first glance, this sense of humor may seem to be a trifle macabre. Actually, it fits perfectly into the cold, brilliant tradition of Ben Jonson, Dean Swift, and Charles Addams. Why else would an intern deposit a patient due for an eight-o’clock operation outside the operating-room door at seven-thirty, where she will be in a position to overhear the highlights of the preceding operation?
You can picture the scene, can’t you? There is the patient, strapped to a cart, partially sedated, and feeling a good deal less than hearty. And through the transom comes a rough male voice saying, “Boy, I never thought it would spurt like that.” Oh, there’s no end to the possibilities for good, clean, sinister mirth.
Rule Four: Look the part. Let’s not pretend that all the mistakes made in hospitals are made by the staff. I’ve known patients who have made beauts. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing more idiotic than the spectacle of a woman just coming out of ether who immediately struggles into a fluffy pink bed jacket and ties a tender blue ribbon into her limp curls. Though scarcely able to lift an arm, she somehow succeeds in applying two layers of make-up before the stroke of visiting hour.
What happens? Gay husband arrives, bearing an azalea, and announces, “Boy, honey, you look great, but let me tell you about the day I had!”
My own theory, which owes something—at least in spirit—to T. S. Eliot’s principle of the “objective correlative,” can be stated simply: if you feel terrible, look terrible. Save that blue ribbon until the happy moment arrives when you notice that you can comb even the back of your hair without becoming so faint that you have to lie down for half an hour afterwards. In addition to the fact that by simulating recovery you get none of the sympathy which psychologists tell us is so necessary in convalescence, you run the further risk of being brought home from the hospital prematurely. There you’ll be, back in the kitchen frying pork chops, when everybody knows you need rest, rest, rest. So I say: no lipstick, forget about the cold cream, let those fine lines appear. Make it very difficult for your friends to tell you that they never saw you looking better in your life. With any luck, you may even startle an acquaintance into making an intelligent remark, like “Helen, you poor darling, you look ghastly—I bet you feel rotten, don’t you?”
Rule Five: I’m sorry, but Rule Five seems to have gone out of my head. I have this sharp pain. Well, it’s more like a twinge than a pain—but a deep twinge. Excuse me while I call Dr. Meredith.
About the Author
Jean Kerr (1922–2003) was an Irish-American author and playwright born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and best known for her humorous bestseller, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and the plays King of Hearts and Mary, Mary.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957 by Jean Kerr
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5574-1
This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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