Get Well Soon! by Kristy Chambers

Author:Kristy Chambers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000;BIO017000;BIO007000
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2012-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Tampon

I’m pretty sure nobody told me about this sort of thing when I was studying. I could clearly recall lectures about pressure sores, and the different kinds of shock, and learning about potassium and sodium and all the magic invisible processes that made bodies work. I definitely do not remember being warned that some day I would smell something so unholy it would make my eyes water, but even if I had, I would never have believed it could be that bad, although now I know better. It can.

After working in Bone Marrow Transplant, I thought I was used to godawful-smelling things. When people developed graft-versus-host disease of the gut, which is basically when the body rejects the transplant and declares war on itself, their insides came out in a foul, continuous purge. If a patient had a gastrointestinal haemorrhage, their bowel motions became tarry and black, also known as ‘melena’, and it smelt like hell. Chemotherapy-induced diarrhoea was hideous, too, as was shit, generally, and most days there was plenty of it to go around.

I was lulled into a false sense of olfactory security in Detox, because the patients walked around freely and weren’t hooked up to IV fluids or machinery, and when a patient threw up and I asked where the sick bags were kept, the other nurses started pulling faces and saying, ‘Oh my god, she’s throwing up?’ because they didn’t normally encounter the more disgusting parts of nursing that were par for the course elsewhere. So I was caught off-guard on a couple of occasions. One of the first instances was when Johnny, a homeless guy, arrived for an alcohol detox. I gave him a little tour of the ward and made a point of showing him where the showers were and got him some hospital pyjamas so he could change out of his filthy clothes. He didn’t have shoes – someone had stolen them when he was passed out in a park – and his feet were black and caked in dirt. He smelt like he hadn’t bathed in months, if not years, and he hadn’t been sober in all that time either, so even a brief walk around the ward tired him out and he asked if he could lie down for a little while. I directed him to his bed and he lay down on top of the covers with his eyes clamped shut and his arms by his side, like a body laid out for viewing.

Five minutes later he was at the nurses’ station, holding on to the bench to prevent himself from toppling over backwards. His cerebellum had taken a beating and a half, and he couldn’t stand up, or stay up, without support.

‘Where’s the toilet?’ he asked.

‘Just down there.’ I pointed at the closest lavatory. God, he smelled terrible.

He shuffled off down the hall, grabbing on to the handrail as he went, but the smell didn’t lessen. It lingered and, if anything, the intensity increased. I walked around to the other side of the bench and there it was, waiting.

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