Pride, prejudice, and nursing

REFLECTING ON: Personal prejudices and confronting them while providing home care to patients during my community health rotation.

So I think it’s pretty clear that I have a strong prejudice towards rich folks. I judge them and am convinced that their money is what contributes to their swollen egos and entitlement. I have had enough negative experiences with them that I also hold the belief that their lack of humility within the healthcare setting is what allows them to make unnecessary demands and strike fear into the hearts of all healthcare providers because of their access to attorneys. They ask for help yet threaten lawsuits, which in my opinion, is the factor in hospitals and most institutional settings being unable to provide the necessary resources to all parts of their patient population.

Then I met Susan and all my prejudices fell by the wayside. She’s 94, has a metastasized abdominal tumor that, because of its advanced progression, could only be debulked rather than removed. Even after the debulking surgery, her GI system struggled to work through her colostomy. Sometimes her stool was green, sometimes light brown. Today it was orange, though she referred to it as “a tawny mustard”. Susan was so yellow as she lay against her white sheets, we now think the cancer has spread to her liver. I later learned that Susan used to have the healthy habit of running marathons. Her heart sounds confirmed that story: regular and strong like a Swiss watch.

Her husband, though well intentioned, was having a difficult time switching roles from high-powered banker to home-care provider—he recently had a run in with the washing machine where he put in too much detergent and flooded the laundry room. Even if he could provide competent care, Susan had an enormous amount of pride and wouldn’t let him switch her ostomy bag. Though she had tried at first to switch the bag by herself, the fact that she had relented to let us provide care indicated to me that she knew her time was close. She wouldn’t talk about that directly, though, and refused to be seen by hospice. Understandably, Susan wanted to continue to see the nurse that she had become comfortable with. Now, in her twilight, she had so little control and was being threatened with having to see a whole new batch of people. How’s that for humility?

In Susan’s perfect Pacific Heights mansion with a perfect view of the Bay, we changed her colostomy bag, switched her fentanyl patch, and drew blood for labs to confirm in our suspicions regarding her liver.

The perfect view doesn’t matter much when you’re in pain.