The Christmas Lesson

“We’ll get you to do Emma’s treatment tonight?” the charge nurse said to me as she was doing her workload assignment plan. “It’s difficult, takes time, but Emma will put you at ease with it.”

It was Christmas Eve, and I was looking forward to the morning when my children would see what Santa had brought to them from the North Pole. Christmas is a hectic time for a young, working mother, and I was feeling fatigued. There had been so many Christmas Concerts to attend, parties to which we had been invited, shopping for Santa, baking special foods, and all that we do at Christmas time that I find so excessive. But it had to be done for the children, making their Christmas special. I was young and could withstand it better than I would today, thirty years later. When I was given my assignment to care for Emma, I detected a sigh of relief from the nursing staff who worked permanently on that unit. It caused me to become apprehensive about my duty assignment, and made me question precisely what I had to do.

During the holidays our hospital reassigned nurses to where the need was greatest, as they staffed the hospital, accommodating the statutory holidays of their employees. I had already worked a day shift on this particular unit, had heard about how involved Emma’s care was, as a carcinoma was gradually destroying her face, exposing blood vessels and leaving her prone to hemorrhage. I had never met the frail little lady at the end of the corridor.

So now I was working a night shift on this long term care unit, known as Progressive Care. Everything was different from the usual on this unit, because most patients wore their street clothes and ate meals in the unit’s dining room. I found it to be a gratifying experience. Many people would be going out of the hospital the next day, Christmas Day, to spend time with their families.

I read Emma’s chart and realized that going home was not an option for her. She was an eighty-year-old woman who suffered in silence with the advanced and disfiguring carcinoma. Many of us only knew what Emma looked like from her photographs. She required too much care to be eligible for a Nursing Home, so she stayed on Progressive Care, a place she now thought of as ‘home’.