As child, I said I wanted to be a nurse. As a high school senior, I applied for college thinking pre-med. As a college freshmen I encountered chemistry and re-considered.
As a mother and wife, I happily settled for letting my husband dispense the medicine, diagnose the illnesses and decide who needed to go to the doctor. I took care of the well baby check-ups and read a lot of books about home cures and how to analyze when to go to the doctor, but ultimately I left the decision to my husband.
His recent partial knee replacement operation only validated my decision to skip most of the hands-on stuff.
I drove him home from the out-patient surgery and did as instructed on the release sheet: “Someone must stay with this patient for the next 24 hours.”
Pain medications took care of the first 12 hours or so. Through the hangover from the anesthesia, he mumbled, “I really don’t feel anything.”
“No dear, that is the effect of the medication they gave you.”
As hours passed and the medication wore off, he realized exactly what that meant about bed time. He needed me to hand him the pain medication, to prop up his foot on pillows, to arrange pillows to prop the blankets above his foot so they would not irritate him by laying on it. And so I would not disturb his painful leg, I slept on the couch.
At 2 a.m,. nicely settled into a sound sleep, I heard him call, asking me to bring him the pain pill.
“I had to call you five times and say please before you responded,” he told me.
I was too tired to even yawn, but I used my healthy, not hurting legs to take me down the hall, pick up the pill and a glass of water for him.
Pain awoke us both at 6 a.m. I handed him another pill and drifted off to sleep.
By 8 a.m. Saturday, he hobbled out to sleep in the lounge chair and asked me, “Aren’t you going to yard sales this morning?”
I looked at him through sleep-deprived eyes. “Well I do need to go into town to pick up a couple things, but I was kind of tired, so I was waiting until I knew those stores were open.”
I left, gathered a few things from in town and returned to a greatly refreshed patient with the list of “must buys’ fulfilled.
I cleared away some of the clutter and debris of his first 24 hours of recovery. I re-routed all my trips to ensure I did not joggle his lounge chair. I wanted to avoid accidentally knocking his surgically repaired leg. A friend, who is a nurse, stopped by to reassure me that everything that alarmed me was perfectly normal and he would do just fine.
Great. I collapsed onto our bed while he took a late afternoon nap in the lounge chair.
Several times the first couple of days, I helped him pull up the therapeutic stocking around his leg: Changing gauze, relieving pressure and smoothing all the tucks in the bandage. Every time I did so with great trepidation lest I jar his wound and increase his pain.
We straightened, loosened and smoothed out that wrap innumerable times before he declared it free of the extra folds and bumps that felt like rocks on his pain-sensitized leg.
Before he went to sleep that night we had another two or three sessions of tugging and pulling on pillows, moving them an inch or two this way and that until they fit just right.
Again, I woke up and carried him pills at 2 a.m., but I never heard awake at dawn when he eagerly embraced permission to “change the bandage.”
I didn’t hear him hobble out and take his pill.
I did not hear him prepare and eat his breakfast.
I did not wake up until long after I should have been teaching Sunday School.
That night I did not wake up at all. If he could get in and out of the shower, hobble down the hall for medication and arrange his bandages during the day, he could do any of it at night. I resigned as nurse and caught up on my sleep.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)