Senior Nurse Mentor

Hospital Gowns

In June, the complex orthopedic surgeries began. Perhaps because I was the only guy on the nursing staff, I spent much of that summer alternating between the two clusters with boys or girls who’d had those surgeries. I had more strength to move them in bed or to steady them while walking to the toilet.

The boys were in a four-bed room on C cluster. Their surgeries were often self-inflicted and due to sports injuries or motorcycle accidents. That sometimes meant traction, which left them even more dependent on nurses and hence unhappy. Those who could walk, ever so slowly, to the restroom worried me most. Some were football players so large that, if they’d started slipping, I wasn’t sure I could keep them from crashing onto our hard linoleum. I decided that I had to be quick to stop a fall before it progressed too far.

The girls were in a four-bed room on B cluster. Their surgeries were often to correct excessive twists in their spine. Even the thought of what that involved—placing two steel rods alongside their backbone and changing how muscles and tendons connected—gave me an enormous respect for them. They were brave.

Their surgeries could last for as long as eight hours. Afterward they typically lay on their back for weeks, occasionally moving from side to side, but unable to sit. That left them dependent on nursing care, which often meant me. If one of those girls had asked what my work responsibilities were, I could have answered, “Everything you find embarrassing.” All too true.

The crisis came with my first assignment to those girls B cluster. Within minutes, I realized that they and I were in a complicated situation. None had a scrap of clothing under their flimsy gowns. 

At first, I blamed the nurses I worked with: “Can’t they dress these girls better when I’m around?” Only later did I realize it wasn’t their fault. The girls themselves were making that decision. Boys and girls are different. Boys wore their undies with an almost religious intensity because it didn’t cause any problems for them when they used urinals. For girls, undies make bedpans a major hassle. 

That’s why in Hospital Gowns I tell my teen readers one of the unfortunate facts of being a patient. In an hospital, I write, you have to deal with three great ills—pain, hassle, and embarrassment. Often you can eliminate only two of the three. You have to endure the third. These girls considered the hassle of bedpans with undies worse than the embarrassment without them.

Initially, I didn’t understand that. My first day of caring for them was like my first days on Hem-Onc, but with embarrassment rather than pain as the central issue. That dread First Fear had returned.

To make sure I made no mistakes, I adopted a role-playing attitude much like I did when caring for dying children on Hem-Onc. With dying children, my chief fear was that I’d withdraw, make my visits to their room as brief as possible, and not look them in the eyes or get close to them. Those are normal ways to act, but they’re the last things I wanted to do with a dying child who felt fearful and alone in the middle of the night.

So when I went into those children’s room, I consciously took on a special role and acted in a specific way. I made sure my visit wasn’t hurried no matter how busy I was. If I needed to talk with them, I’d crouch down beside their bed and look them in the eyes. I wanted them to know I’d be there for them to the very end.

I took a similarly careful role when I came into these girls room. I‘m a visitor, I told myself, so I need to behave as such. In that role, I did my best to win their trust. 

I didn’t linger, although that mattered little. As needy as they were, they were two-thirds my work load. I created virtual privacy. As I worked with each girl, whenever possible I faced away from the others. That made it almost like I wasn’t in their room. Last of all, I always glanced away from something embarrassing and certainly didn’t stare.