Bed Bath: The First Day of the Rest of Her Life

BedBathIllustration“Bed Bath,” the January Reflections column by pediatric nurse practitioner Kathleen Hughes, is a description of giving a first bed bath as a nurse after many years working in other professions. It’s not the first essay we’ve ever published about giving a bed bath, but it’s wise and meditative and well worth a read. Here’s a small section of this short essay, but please read the whole thing.—Jacob Molyneux, senior editor

An Ivy League degree and 15 years of teaching and writing did not prepare me any better than my mostly 20-something counterparts in the ways of giving a bed bath to a 72-year-old man I’d never met. What might be different for me is that I have known many kinds of professional challenges. What might also be different is that I have lived enough longer to have attended my father’s hospital-bound illness and death, and to have given birth to and cared for two young children. And so when I washed this man, I was washing my father, I was washing my children; I became one of those people who cared for us. Though giving a bed bath is not anything like lecturing to AP students on Faulkner, or writing a newspaper article on gun control or university library funding or modern exorcisms, I am not sure that either of those tasks made me hunker in a corner for five minutes, gathering myself before striding into the room. I’ve […]

A Hurricane Sandy Bed Bath

Amanda Anderson, BSN, RN, CCRN, works as an intensive care nurse in New York City and is pursuing a master’s in administration from Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing at Hunter College.

Hurricane Sandy/NASA Goddard photo Hurricane Sandy/NASA Goddard photo

When Hurricane Sandy hit, the bloated feeling from snack and rom-com binging proved my deepest suffering. Safe, dry, and bored on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I was little harmed by the storm. My commute across the park proved adventuresome, but I slept in my own bed; I had a bed.

As the city calmed in the weeks following, I watched my fellow New Yorkers erupt in volunteer revolutions. Feeling guilty about my idle skills, I signed up with New York City Department of Health’s Medical Reserve Corps, the organization staffing emergency shelters.

On my scheduled morning, I arrived to find the clinic behind an old door marked with a handwritten sign that said “Medical.” Inside, a crowded group of older professionals—MDs, NPs, social workers—listened as a frazzled and tired pediatrician gave shift report.

Few medical needs plagued the shelter, but one reported client stuck out—a feisty octogenarian evacuee, Ms. E. Her lengthy medication list suggested cardiac problems, and her arthritic frame limited her mobility. Stairs were out of the question.

Report dragged on. I left to find some work […]

2016-11-21T13:06:56-05:00July 24th, 2013|Nursing|3 Comments
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