[Fourth – perhaps there will be five – in a series on my hospital experiences last month.]
[March 26 - 31]
Porträts (Wednesday)
As I lay in the hospital, recovering, with not many things happening on any given day (a status which will last for about a week, as it happens), I meet various nurses, young doctors, senior doctors, cleaners, and very occasionally orderlies; they become my circle, my network, my universe.
***
Melanie is young, with an extraordinarily fresh complexion and delicate coloring. Her face is pushed in a little too much around the nose to be quite beautiful, but the textures, the general air of angelic delicacy, that she projects makes one think of beauty, of feminity, of fragility. She is businesslike and direct about cleaning me, moving me, giving me shots and checking the status of my body and its attached tubes; but she is also, unusually, always in a hurry, always moving slightly faster than she should, if she’s going to get everything exactly right.
It’s odd, as though she has worked really hard to be a good nurse – and for the most part she is a good nurse; I trust her, and am always pleased to see her – but she gets things slightly wrong through speed, through haste. She is in fact an illustration of ‘more haste, less speed’ (a proverb that always makes me wonder if it can be reduced in some way – as my mother humorously reduced ‘waste not, want not’ to its logically required components as: ‘waste, want’, a refocusing I found increasingly witty over the passing years).
It does occur to me: could she possibly be going faster because she is slightly panicky at my HIV/HCV status? Everyone is, indeed has been, so utterly matter-of-fact and unintimidated by the fact that my blood and other secretions are poisonous, even in the days when they thought that the Chefarzt was infected. But this is probably paranoia on my part: chances are good that sweet, gentle Melanie is simply hampered by the pressures she has invented for herself out of nursing, out of the vast number of skills and pieces of knowledge that are demanded of any nurse, in that context that always seems to require all of one’s abilities all at once.
***
Later, I will talk to Joyce about Melanie’s delicate skin, and how it, and her behavior, reminds me of Theweleit’s image of the compassionate nurse, the White Woman who takes care of the Nazi soldiers. Theweleit’s Männerphantasien, an astounding book, pivots on the opposition between that White Woman and the Red Woman (the Communist, the gun-wielding revolutionary); Joyce remembers this somewhat differently, as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Marian figures, but she can see what I mean by it all.
Melanie is too young to be very Marian, in any way at all; but, although I am in no way heterosexual, I perceive in my relationships with these nurses something that helps me understand the Theweleit a bit better – a frankly romantic, affectionate, loving quality; the intimacy of care, which could so easily (if one were bent that way) become loving, passionate, even sexual. I can see, a little better, how all those soldiers felt after the war; and why they married their nurses.
***
Speaking of medical personnel slightly overwhelmed by the way they see their jobs: young Dr Türck, a not unhandsome, high-strung young man, slightly swarthy but with beautifully clear skin and big dark eyes, always seems to be in a panic when he talks to the Chefarzt, as though he’s about to piss himself. It’s a bit like those moments in Scrubs – when a young but basically competent doctor is frantically trying to remember everything at once, in order to impress the savage Dr Cox. When Türck was alone with me, The Patient, asking questions about my insurance, he was in control, but slightly supercilious though perfectly polite: it is interesting to see how he experiences dynamics between people as a matter of hierarchy, control, power, and fear. Of course, he probably won’t grow into a mature doctor until he puts at least some of that behind him.
Incidentally, the other day, when the insurance administrators came to quiz me about my status, I told them that “young Dr Türck” was the one who knew what was going on with my case, and they should go ask him. They looked at me in confusion and some discomfort; after some wrangling, where I’d mentioned Türck several times, I realized that they had misunderstood, and emphasized that Türck was his name. And they suddenly relaxed…
Obviously, they’d thought I was making a clumsy and mildly racist identification: you may know that Turks are the complicating racial ‘other’ in Germany, and they are actually a large part of the population around Stuttgart (the airport had signs in three languages, and they aren’t the ones you expect – Turkish was first, then German, then French). If you were to try to translate the situation, it would be as though I had said Dr Black (meaning, as it happens, a young black doctor whose name was also Black), and they had heard it as, “you have to talk to that black doctor to get the information”. Hmm. It is, of course, in this German context, a slightly – well, awkward name; I wonder if he gets peculiar looks from time to time.
***
Melanie has a satellite, an even younger but much less able and very unintelligent nurse, whom I call in my head the Dingbat – she might be a trainee of some kind, although she has the same uniform as the others, at least as far as I can tell. She has a plump and friendly face with a big smile, black hair in a round, bouncy bob. Despite the smile, I am nervous when she comes in, as she has absolutely no idea what she’s doing and no idea whom to ask: when she moves the drip needle to a different place on my arm (and I’m thinking: do I dare ask her to get somebody else do this? – but Melanie is watching and clearly this is a learning setup for the Dingbat), she is obviously struggling to remember what she’s supposed to do. And yes, what she does hurts, kind of a lot (remember the line in Angels in America, when Belize says a drip can go in so smooth you’d think you were born with it, or alternatively it can feel like it’s pumping Drano…).
The next day when the Dingbat comes in alone, and I ask her to do something with the plastic bar with the button you use to ring for the nurses – it has been unwound and put out of my reach while someone gave me a shot – she wraps it round and round the triangular bar above my head, about twenty times to use up the slack, and leaves it hanging practically in my eyes. The next nurse in redoes it, with rapid professional moves, in the ‘correct’ three times around to hang in exactly the right place.
Fortunately, the Dingbat only comes in for two days out of my whole stay. Bless her clueless little heart…
***
And here is a most exquisite beauty, a young doctor with a lovely face severely framed by the kind of glasses that are meant to cause men to take her seriously, her hair artfully pulled back to show highlights of blonde and brown. Her last name is, as it happens, Italian, though she was clearly born here; she is perhaps my favorite of them all, strongly competent, proactive, charming without working at it, and even gently but assertively distressed when anything goes wrong. For my final week here, she will in fact be one of my most trusted sources of information and advice – almost more than the Chefarzt, who is of course mostly fairly preoccupied with larger matters.
I wish I could remember her name, though perhaps I shouldn’t put the last names of my caregivers on this blog (which is why I always call him the Chefarzt – although he has an interesting name, one which you know from famous automotive companies – which means something in Stuttgart, the great automotive center of Germany; and of course I had to tell you Türck’s last name, but hopefully that will never get back to him). Even when I first met her, her combination of a strict no-nonsense style with a sensed-rather-than-seen underlying sweetness was attractive; you could imagine that young male doctors would want to ask her out, but never dare to do so.
Her voice is husky, always a bit hoarse, though still a light girl’s voice. She takes my questions and requests seriously, as though I know what I’m talking about – always a great pleasure in medical care. One of the most startling moves she will make happens towards the end of my second week here, when she is changing my bandages: she, with precision and no repugnance, sniffs the length of the used bandage – sniffing to see if the pus is infected or not. It is a move that would alarm those of us who are not medical types; and it seems something she would have learned from the Chefarzt – a direct, realistic appraisal by smell, touch, feel, of what’s going on; the evident heritage of a country doctor, as accustomed to farmyards as to hospitals, and more trusting of his senses than of medical tests. It is peculiarly crude and delicate at the same time – and also strangely moving.
***
Speaking of the Chefarzt: I have already spoken of him a great deal, but perhaps it is possible to round out the portrait a bit.
(… round out… perhaps a poor choice of words; he is after all a fairly hefty guy…)
As I’ve mentioned, he is respected and somewhat feared; and the running joke is that he is a Landarzt, or country doctor (compare, perhaps, the famous stories under that title by Kafka and by Chekhov). Rough, brusque, given to broad strokes, traditional approaches, no coddling: the inhabitants of this part of Germany are often treated as rough, unlettered peasants – perhaps he’s seen as a part of that.
He treats me well – very well, in fact. From a few days after surgery, I started asking when I could go home; the Chefarzt started to get slightly irritated, turning to the other doctors who trail in his wake to comment sarcastically that I evidently wanted to be treated by English doctors. This seemed so odd to me that I didn’t even know how to respond – but when he visited the next day, I tried to correct his impression, telling him that it wasn’t that I didn’t like the care in Germany (which was of course excellent, if sometimes a bit chilly and/or disciplined, but of course I didn’t mention that), but just that – well – what I said was that I really, really wanted to recover in comfort back at home, because I wanted so much to be sleeping on the couch, making tea, and reading children’s books….
He apparently forgave me, after that.
***
After a few days, a much older nurse comes in: not friendly, and exaggeratedly Protestant… at first I’m a bit put off, and have the impression that she isn’t particularly interested in her job – is she someone who has gone into nursing after retirement, a sort of docent? She does have a different uniform than the others.
I am, however, entirely wrong, and at every level. Doris is The Head Nurse – the head nurse for this wing, or for the hospital? I don’t know; after all, I’ve been dealing with the head doctor for the entire hospital, she might well be head of everything. As I finally recognize her position, I reinterpret her style – she is brusque because she’s watching everything that all the other nurses do, handing out orders as does the Chefarzt, assuming they’ll be followed, not even bothering to look behind her. (This, then, is where Melanie’s nerves come from, as Türck’s come from the Chefarzt.)
In my last couple of days, I will manage to make friends with her, at least to some extent: I ask her for general advice on taking care of myself after I leave the hospital, etc.; and she warms, slightly, professionally, to this recognition of her superior status.
***
One of the strangest, at first most off-putting, of the nurses, is a dark-haired Eastern European woman with a voice like an antique brass instrument. And really, her voice is astounding: there is a loud buzz of frontal vowels, and all the consonants of her German are inevitably smashed together at the beginnings and endings of syllables; she is hard to understand but unmistakable, even from the other end of the hall – it is as though someone were suddenly playing a baritone krummhorn, a serpent, a sackbut, outside my closed door. Her family name starts with an H, has a J in it somewhere, and is to my eye completely alien, like Basque or Etruscan – I ask her where she is from; with a certain cautious hostility she says she is from Kosovo. I immediately say something vague but positive, and she relaxes; it is possible that she gets different reactions from different people these days.
Her face is mannish but not unattractive, her big dark eyes intelligent, the hair dark and heavy; in fact her hair, like her voice, is one of those things that must be seen – its texture has the strangeness of a Balkan epic, and when her hair hangs over her eyes it is as though it is made of swords. Heavy and straight, as though the strands are steel, it suggests the brutal nobility of those intricately related Slavic and Asian tribes that crowd into the spaces north of Greece.
It is really so remarkable what different materials make up the humans around us: my Chinese students in Hong Kong all had the same black Asian hair (except for the desperate few who tried to do something with henna, but they were always mostly unsuccessful, only achieving an ugly rusty variation on the norm); but this woman’s hair is like nothing I’ve never seen….
Her braying, brassy horn of a voice is comforting, if hard to understand; for she is competent, with the unfussy competence of battlefields, which she may actually know something about. Once I have negotiated those crucial seconds of finding out she’s Kosovan, without insulting her, or showing myself to be an enemy (I shudder to think what she would do to her enemies), she treats me as one of her own: and that, too, is moving.
***
And now, finishing writing this nearly two months later, the Kosovan is the one I remember best: at night, when she is sitting at the nurse’s station, talking quietly (as though a krummhorn were asked to play pianissimo) to the other nurse, in an empty, brightly lit space; because I am unable to sleep, as always (for it feels as though I never, ever, really sleep in the hospital, not for the whole two weeks); her presence, her powerful ability to handle any situation, is comforting. And so I walk, decently covered by the gray robe borrowed from Joyce, navigating my drip pole in intricate circles next to me, up and down past the nurses in the hall, getting a little exercise, in this unending dead center of the night.
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