The woman responded by throwing the respiratory mask across the room.
“Don’t poison me.” The woman began sobbing, out of nowhere. “Please, please, please. I’m in pain. Please, no poison.” She continued to jerk violently in the bed.
“I’m here to help you. We’re all here to help you. In fact . . . you—what’s your name?”
The nurse looked directly at me and pointed.
“Um. Drew,” I answered.
“Drew, come help me with the restraints. We need to get this IV in ASAP.”
“I thought we were only supposed to observe today?” I said it stupidly, instantly feeling my face heat up.
“A bonus experience,” she said. “Lucky you. I need someone’s help with this ASAP. Are you going to lend a hand or not?”
I rushed over to her, trying my best to ignore the squirming feeling in my stomach. The nurse instructed me to hold the patient’s left arm down so that she could fasten the first restraint band.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Ferguson.” The nurse used her strident, higher-pitched voice again when addressing the woman. “This is just so we can get you hydrated.”
I managed to grab the woman’s flailing arm and lower it to the bedrail. While the nurse was preparing the first set of restraints, the woman looked at me. Dark makeup was smeared down her face, and her eyes widened when we made eye contact, almost like I was someone she knew. I thought maybe we were making a connection, maybe I had some calming effect on her.
I was wrong. I was just about to speak to the woman, say something reassuring to her, when she suddenly lurched her free arm at me. Her fingernails were surprisingly long and sharp, and they scratched into my skin in one fast, brute motion as the woman wailed.
I gasped and instinctively withdrew both of my arms. Now freed from my grip, the woman flailed and thrashed about even more aggressively than before, howling and hollering her accusations of poison.
“For God’s sake.” The nurse gave my arm a quick glance and hit a call button near the bed. I couldn’t tell if she was stressed out or just annoyed with how the situation was unfolding.
“Go to a bathroom and wash your arm,” she ordered me. “I shouldn’t have used a student for this. I’ll get the staff to help me.”
“Sorry,” I blurted, feeling a combination of shock and embarrassment from what had just happened. “I’ll be back in a just a minute.”
“You know what?” The nurse grabbed my arm and gave it a closer inspection. “I really shouldn’t have asked you to do that. Why don’t you just go home. I’d say you’ve fulfilled your observation duties for the day.”
She signed my clinical log for me so that I wouldn’t get in trouble with my supervisor. As I left the room, I glimpsed over at my peers. Two of them were fully absorbed by the patient, who persisted in shouting about poison, and now, venom. The third student, Kat, gave me a look with eyebrows arched, lips stretched tight. I arched my eyebrows at her in return.
I found the nearest bathroom and washed my arm with the hottest water I could tolerate. I pressed some paper towels to the wound as I made my way out of the hospital.
I was embarrassed by the incident, yes.
But so much more than that, I was ecstatic about the fact that I’d gotten out of clinical rounds almost two hours early.
◈ ◈ ◈
Done with my school obligations for the day earlier than expected, I decided to go back to the apartment and get ahead on studying and textbook-reading. Maybe I’d even have time to get my bedroom fully unpacked and organized.
The hospital was close enough to my apartment so that I could walk, which I appreciated at the current time of year. It was the end of September, and Fall was just beginning to reveal itself—a light crispness in the air, red tinges on the tips of leaves. I wasn’t sure I’d want to be walking very often in the winter, though, when the snow came along.
Back at the apartment, I made a beeline for the bathroom. When I pushed open the door, I found Cambria there, leaning in toward the mirror with a makeup brush in one hand and a container of powder in the other.
“Excuse me.” Cambria kept her eyes locked on her reflection. “I’m in here.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m fixing my makeup.” She continued applying the pigmented powder to her cheeks. “I told you I spend a lot of time doing my makeup, Drew.”
“Yeah, you already spent twenty-five minutes applying it this morning. I figured that was what you were referring to.”
“I do checkups throughout the day.” Her eyes had still not abandoned the mirror. “One around noon, one in the afternoon, and then one more in the evening if I’m going out.”
“Are you kidding? Why?”
“I have to make sure it’s being maintained properly. I have naturally oily skin, so it can get, like, gross and messed up as the day wears on.”
“How do you have time for this? Shouldn’t you be on campus right now?”
“My next class is in fifteen minutes. I’ll be out of here by then. And then you can do . . . whatever it is you do in the bathroom.”
“You mean pee?”
“Sure.”
She had finished with the blush and moved onto tweaking her eyeliner. Sighing, I turned away and sought refuge from her insanity in my bedroom. That was not such an oasis from insanity, however: there were boxes in every corner of my room, piles of belongings I’d lazily sorted the previous night, and clothes scattered on the surface of my bed.
I found myself sighing again as I dropped my schoolbag onto the floor. At least I had organized my desk, which was on the wall opposite the bed. That pretty precisely reflected my top priority in life: school. The nursing program required students to maintain 3.0 GPAs at the minimum, but personally, I was set on maintaining my 4.0. I told myself this was because it would yield great letters of recommendation from my instructors and make me more desirable to employers. But deep down, part of me knew that I did it mostly out of perfectionism. It would kill me to see my GPA drop, even by 0.01 points.
Looking around at the clutter that was my bedroom, I realized something. There was no way I could study effectively in this mess. I could hardly think straight in general, as though the mess were invading my brain. So, instead of sitting at my desk and mustering up the mental capacity to study, I decided it was time I clean my room.
I got one of The Cure’s albums playing on my phone, and for the first fifteen minutes, I worked on the items that were already out of their boxes. I sorted them properly this time and stored them away in the closet and few pieces of furniture I had. Then, grabbing my boxcutter, I approached a stack of boxes in one corner of the room. There was a small box on top of the stack labeled with only a star on the cardboard, drawn in green marker.
“Hey.”
I snapped my head around and saw Cambria in the doorway.
“I’m heading out,” she said. “I’m going to my chemistry class. It has lab right afterward, so I’ll be gone for like . . . forever, basically.”
“Okay. Have fun.”
As she began turning around, I said, “Hey, Cambria? You know when you’re an OBGYN, you won’t have time to constantly be fixing your makeup.”