Broken-Down Me

I hate to criticize oncology nurses. I honestly appreciate the care they have given me and the difficulty of dealing constantly with seriously ill patients. Yet, on a recent hospital stay, my oncology nurses failed me. They treated my physical symptoms but completely left me hanging emotionally.

I entered the hospital for a stem cell transplant. Though informed by my medical team—including my nurses—that the stay would be “tough,” I never imagined the sea of human suffering I would enter, and the trauma it would leave on my very soul.

On one particularly bleak day, I was sent to get a chest x-ray under suspicion of pneumonia. I chose to go in a wheelchair instead of a gurney, having been told that sitting was better for my lungs than lying down. My 15-year-old daughter accompanied me, a fact that probably averted my total breakdown.

Once in the x-ray waiting room, seated in my wheelchair, separated on 3 sides by curtains yet able to see the other patients across the aisle in front of me, the screaming started. It came from behind me, on the other side of one of the curtains.

“Nooooo!” I heard the woman screech. “Owwww! There is no blood! Stop!” Then the spine-tingling sobbing started.

I heard the nurses’ voices trying to soothe her. “We need to take blood to be able to know what is going on,” I heard one say. “It’s all right,” another stated. “We are right here with you.”

Clearly in distress, the woman continued to scream and sob. I could not see her, but I could feel her misery. Tears welled in my eyes and streamed down my cheeks. I took my daughter’s advice and covered my ears, uselessly trying to block out the sounds of suffering that now, 5 weeks later, continue to be indelibly imprinted on my psyche.

Even as I write this, I cannot help but sob at the vivid memory of so much horror. I wanted to jump out of my wheelchair and tell the nurses to leave that woman alone! I wanted to scream myself, scream about the injustice of normal people suffering indescribable pain. I wanted to shout about the fear all cancer patients face every second of every day! But instead, I muffled the sounds, my hands on my ears, tears streaming down my face, and my sweet daughter patting my leg, trying to calm me.

After my x-ray, when I got back to my room on the stem cell transplant floor, I continued to sob. I could not shake the sounds of the woman’s screams. Of course, this one event did not cause my complete breakdown. Instead, it was just one more event added to a string of experiences during my hospital stay—the crying of a grown man I heard on my hall begging for more painkillers, the unknown patient in the room next to me who I could hear gasping for air between strangling coughing fits during the night, and my own vomiting, diarrhea, and disorientation caused by my treatment—that broke me. “It’s all right, Mommy,” my daughter told me. Yet, even with the gnawing knowledge that I should probably not cry so desperately in front of my child, I could not stop.

About 15 minutes after returning from my x-ray, I heard a knock on the door. A nurse entered my room. My eyes, puffy and bloodshot from crying, my cheeks covered with streams of tears, could not have gone unperceived by her or anyone else. Yet, she greeted me with a smile and cheerily told me, “Time for your medicine. Here it is,” she chimed as she placed 2 little pills in a tiny cup, filled a plastic cup with water, and handed the pills and the water to me. “Glad you got back from your x-ray.”

What? Didn’t you see me? Am I invisible except as a vessel in which to pump medicines supposedly going to help me? Do you have any idea what I have been through, what my colleagues in suffering have been through? Do you have any concept of what it means to see fellow human beings reduced to their most desperate states—to witness grown men and women beg for relief from excruciating pain, to listen to the unparalleled anguish of adults gasping for breath, to be immersed in a sea of distress you can do nothing to mitigate? Even soldiers in the midst of war have orders, weapons, and comrades to help them through the atrocities; I and all patients have none. Certainly many of us have family and friends who serve as caregivers. But do you really think that they have the training to guide us through the landmines that dot the hospital landscape? Have you, dear nurse, become blinded to your own workplace reality? Have you seen so much suffering that you no longer recognize it? At the very least, could you or any of your colleagues have asked me during my 4-week stay if I was all right, why I was crying, or taken 5 minutes to comfort me emotionally? All I needed was a few simple sentences: “I know you have seen a lot of suffering, but I want to let you know that most of those patients will be all right.” “Are you all right? This can be really difficult on your emotions, I know. Do you want to tell me what is bothering you?” “Why are you so sad? Tell me what is making you so sad. Sometimes it helps just to talk about it for a minute.”

As I said at the beginning of this article, I hate to criticize my nurses. However, I hate even more my sporadic crying sprees nearly 3 weeks after being released from the hospital, the guilt of my children having to see me reduced to a babbling baby, my inability to erase the pain of other human beings from my memory, and the profound sadness that grips me when I think of all those patients in the hospital right now who need just a comforting word from a nurse but who will not get it. Am I angry? Yes! Is it all the nurses’ fault? Not all, but they are the frontline, and they could have helped. Will I ever recover from the emotional scars left from that hospital stay? Eventually I will learn to live better with them, perhaps, but like all scars, they will stay. For now, my immediate task is to try to rebuild—perhaps by trying to smile one time more per day, by visualizing that most of the patients I heard suffering are now at home like me, or by making an effort to understand why my nurses never comforted me—the broken- down me.