The Making of a Nurse (3 page)

“DON’T GO TO SCHOOL,”
my mother said one day that fall. “Stay home with me. I need you.” She stretched out her arms to me. “I feel better when you are here.” I had been missing a lot of school,
but my teachers didn’t seem to mind. I lay down beside my mother on my parents’ rumpled bed, and we watched
TV
and ate marsh-mallows. In the afternoon, I got up and walked around aimlessly, feeling homesick. The house was dark, messy, and had a sour, musty smell. Stacks of old newspapers were piled up and there were dusty books everywhere. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave home like my brothers. I went into the bathroom and examined myself in the mirror. Looking back at me was just a sad, ordinary girl.

“Brown hair, green eyes. Average height and weight,” the school nurse had recorded on my chart that I snuck a peek at. “Well-nourished. Brushes her teeth correctly.”

“Shy. Introverted,” the school’s guidance counsellor had written in my file that I read upside down, from the other side of his desk. “Quiet and helpful.”

“What do I look like?” I went back to the bed and asked my mother.

“
Du bist wie eine Blume,”
she trilled, clasping her hands to her heart.

But I didn’t want to be a blossom, or a ray of sunshine, nor a star from the heavens above. I did not want to be an angel or a nurse. I wanted to be a normal girl with a normal mother.

I got back on the bed beside her and resumed my ongoing project of plucking out tufts of chenille nap from their olive-coloured bedspread while watching
Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched
, and my favourite,
Dr. Ben Casey
. He was a neurosurgeon, played by the gorgeous heartthrob Vince Edwards. The opening always gave me chills when a disembodied hand appeared on the screen and wrote the following symbols while a solemn voiceover intoned the words: “man
, woman
, birth *, death †, and infinity ∞.” I sat, my eyes riveted to the screen, fingering the bedspread threads and pretending they were the dark chest hairs sticking out of the collar of Dr. Casey’s white shirt, always open by one or two buttons. That open shirt showed his maverick spirit as he battled brain tumours and aneurysms and rebelled against the conservative medical establishment that tried to rein him in. He didn’t suffer fools gladly and was gruff and demanding, but he was a dreamboat and besides, he had to be cruel to be kind, didn’t he?
He dared to perform complicated operations that no one else would touch, even risking his own life once when he accidentally contaminated himself with a patient’s needle. Gentle Nurse Wills was always at his side to soften the blow and to wipe the sweat from his brow during long operations. She was there, too, after hours, to help him take his mind off things, at least until the episode when he fell in love with a patient who had been in a coma for thirteen years, but awoke looking more beautiful than ever, every hair in place and her make-up on!

As soon as my mother fell asleep, I went out and walked to Shopper’s Drug Mart. Once, I had noticed there large plastic bottles of big pink capsules filled with white gelatine powder, guaranteed to strengthen brittle fingernails. I bought a bottle and returned home. In the bathroom I emptied each capsule into the sink. I wrote messages on tiny marijuana rolling-papers I found in one of my brothers’ rooms and inserted each one into an empty capsule. “Time for your medicine,” I said, handing her one along with a glass of the purple loganberry juice that she loved. “Just what the doctor ordered. Miracle pills.” I opened one and read it to her. “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.” Others read, “You Can Do It!” or “Keep on Truckin’” or “Every Day, in Every Way, You Are Getting Better.” She was so excited she wanted to open them all, but I told her not to overdo it; she’d had enough for one day.

A few hours later, my father came home and got busy making dinner. I sat at the kitchen table and lost myself in the crazy whirling wallpaper that depicted jars of pickles, mustards and relishes, ham hocks and lamb chops, sheaves of wheat, and fruits and vegetables from every vine, tree, and bush, bursting forth out of straw cornucopias. My father heaved pots and frying pans onto the stove and soon his head became enveloped in a cloud of steam that fogged his glasses. Pots splattered and spluttered onto the enamel surface, and as he tasted from each one, he told me about his day. “If the customer doesn’t tell the dry cleaner about the stain, they can’t treat it. Home remedies are merely first aid, but dry cleaning saves the patient. Guess, what’s the most stubborn stain?”

“Ink?”

“It’s mustard!” he exclaimed. “It takes a lot of know-how to dry clean fabrics, and that’s where Regal Sales excels. We’ve got the best products on the market.” He went to get my mother and brought her to the kitchen, and we propped her up at the table. “Come on, Ellie, sit up straight!” he coached. He set bowls of steaming rice and chop suey in front of us. “Kung Hei Fat Choy,” he said to welcome the Chinese New Year. “First, let’s check your progress today.” He flipped through the notes I’d made about whether my mother had done her exercises, what her heart rate and blood pressure had been, and if she had cried. He was pleased with her day. “Now, let’s eat.”

There were very few rules in our family, but one of them was chopsticks.

“Here Ellie, let me get you started.” He positioned them in her hand.

“I’m sorry I’m so slow.” My mother tried to grip the chopsticks, but they slithered away.

“Hold the top one like a pencil. That’s it! Move it up and down. You’ll get it.”

But I could see that she couldn’t grasp a thing so I moved my chair closer to hers and made a napkin into a bib and tied it around her neck. The chopsticks slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor. “No, Tilda, she can’t give up,” I heard my father say as I bent down to pick them up. I decided to stay down there awhile. Crouched under the kitchen table, I began to dream up a plan. I decided that if I would be a devoted and gentle nurse, the kindest, most attentive nurse possible, in return my mother would get well. While I was at it, I would be the most loving, understanding sister so I could make Robbie happy, too. And if I could be a doting, obedient daughter, I could ensure nothing bad would happen to my father.

Unfortunately, in the years that followed, not one of us kept our side of the bargain.

B
y the time I was eleven years old, I had a new patient to worry about.

Something was wrong with my father. Every night, long after midnight, I heard bizarre sounds. I crept into my parents’ bedroom and found my father sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his chest. He had a strained look and in his hand he held a row of white antacid tablets – lined up like the pennies and nickels he rolled and took to the bank. He pounded lightly on his chest.
“Greppps
…,” I heard him say.

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

“Not a thing, my dear. It’s nothing but mild heartburn.
Greckkk
…”

“It seems your father has become a musical instrument. A woodwind,” my mother said. She was lying beside him, waving an imaginary baton in the air. “He’s playing
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”

“It doesn’t sound good, Dad.” I stood there, staring and worrying.

“It’s nothing but garden-variety borborygmi. Intestinal rumblings caused by moving gas.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“Well, as a matter of fact I’ll take you with me to my appointment next week. It will be an educational experience for you. Maybe you’ll be a doctor one day?”

But he had taught me about rhetorical questions; you didn’t have to answer them.

AT THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE
my father went to the men’s room and returned with a plastic container filled to the brim. He handed it to the nurse, saying jovially,
“Urine
the money!” She took it from him carefully. Then, she placed suction cups on his chest, and I stood watching as a needle on a machine rose and fell, sketching twelve different views of his heart on strips of pink graph paper. Next, the nurse drew blood from his arm, and my father beamed at the healthy-looking sample his body had produced. He held the test tube of blood in his hands and marvelled at its warmth. We moved to the examining room, where the doctor took his blood pressure, first one arm and then the other, first standing up and then lying down, and placed his stethoscope on my father’s hairy chest, closed his eyes, and listened.

“Hear a symphony in there, Doc?” my father asked.

The doctor asked him to please be quiet,
please
, so that he could
auscultate
properly. “Have you had chest pain, Mr. Shalof? Palpitations? Indigestion?”

“No problems whatsoever. I’ve never felt better. It’s my wife –”

“Frankly, there are some worrisome findings here. Nothing conclusive, but I would like to do some tests. In the meantime, I am putting you on a strict diet. You are overweight and that is putting a strain on your heart. Also, you have diabetes.” He paused to look over at me. “Your daughter will have to be alert for signs of a precipitous drop in your blood sugar and be prepared to take action.”

Yikes. What did that entail?

“A diet?” echoed my father as if he was unfamiliar with the word. “The great philosopher Montaigne said diets prepare one for death, that they undermine one’s enjoyment of life.”

“Cut back on the calories. Reduce your salt intake. No sugar. Low-fat.”

“What’s left?” He looked quizzical.

“Mr. Shalof, you’re now in your sixties. Have you considered retirement?”

“Please, Doc, I’m a long way off from that.” My father reeled back in mock horror. “Say, about those tests, can I study for them? Ha, ha …”

“First of all, a chest X-ray and more blood work. A barium enema – I know it’s not the most pleasant thing – and I’d like you to see a colleague of mine, a cardiologist.”

“Barium?
Isn’t that what you do with the patients who don’t make it?” The doctor busied himself with the chart, but my father pressed on. “Hey, Doc, what’s Italian for ‘enema’?”

The doctor looked up.

“An
innuendo!
Get it?” A faint smile flickered across the doctor’s lips, which only encouraged my father. “Say, if you jumble up the letters in ‘laxative,’ you get ‘exit lava’! Pretty good, eh?”

“You can book the tests with my nurse,” the doctor said, his back already to us as he opened the door to leave.

After the doctor’s appointment, my father suggested we take a stroll through Queen’s Park. “What a great city!” he exclaimed, gazing around as if at all of Toronto at once. “In New York’s Central Park, you could get mugged. In the Damrak in Amsterdam, you’d get high from the dope fumes. Tilda, take a deep breath of our city’s fresh air.” He helped himself to one. “Enjoy our clean, safe streets.”

I was quiet, brooding over what the doctor had said.

“Are you worried about missing school, Tilda?”

I nodded.
That too
.

“Some experiences in life are more educational than school.” He studied me intently for a moment. “You really are so grown up.”

That had always been my claim to fame.

I often wondered where the mythical truant officer lurked, the one who prowled the streets on the lookout for children playing hooky. I prayed he would find me and send me back to school. The principal and teachers knew there were problems at home and
never questioned my frequent absences. My friend Joy thought I was lucky to miss so much school.

My father jangled his keys in his pocket as we stood on the subway platform waiting for the northbound train to take us home. “See, Tilda, that was one doctor’s
opinion
. We’ll go to other doctors and get more opinions. We’ll make our own inquiries, come to our own conclusions.”

I was busy thinking about the twelve ways of looking at the heart. My father was loving, oh yes, and good-hearted, and kind, and bossy, and I was afraid he was going to die.

MY TELEVISION TRAINING
with Dr. Ben Casey, the neurosurgeon, turned out to be good preparation for my starring role accompanying my parents to doctor’s appointments, especially my mother, to hers with Dr. DeGroot, Chief of Neurology at Toronto General Hospital. I went along to help with buttons, zippers, belts and boots, chairs, stairs, escalators, and furniture. The doctor was tall and severe-looking. She had the same serious expression and wore similar, drab clothes at each visit: a brown tweed skirt, a plain white blouse buttoned to the neck, a white lab coat with a slender silver reflex hammer sticking out of a pocket, and sturdy black oxfords. Her manner was stern and brusque, just like Dr. Ben Casey’s, and she didn’t waste anyone’s time, especially her own.