Vengeance is mine saith the Nurse
Trying something new. Fiction directly from my brain. No editing. No clean up. No re-read. Raw draft.
Part 1
You never forget your first. That’s what they say, isn’t it. That ubiquitous “they” that everyone references but has no proper name. Well, I can confirm. I don’t actually know my current count. I could go add up all my souvenirs, but I know I’m well into double digits, halfway to triple. But that first. Oh, that one has never ceased to make me smile.
His name was Robert. Not Bob or Rob or Bobby or any derivation. And he insisted on being called Mr. Speinlein. Which no one pronounced correctly the first time and he took great delight in correcting. Until we nurses realized his schtick. Then we added notes anywhere we could hide them to tell each other how to pronounce it. “Spine-len” Hand written on post it notes, one stuck to the chart behind the desk, another tucked inside the med cabinet for his room, another in the old chart box on the wall outside his room. No one told him we’d done that, but the new nurses all reported the subtle but clear face if disappointment when they got it right the first time they walked in.
He was a blowhard. The kind of guy who would have joined the military if he had enough balls and then would have insisted you call him sergeant or captain or whatever rank he achieved for the rest of his life. Regardless of whether anyone truly felt he deserved that rank or the respect accorded the moniker. But, he hadn’t joined the military. Once you got to know him a bit, looked under his surface, you found he was the biggest coward, and the worst kind of coward. The kind that took his impotence and fear out on anyone around him he thought he could get away with. One of the male nurses got him chatting and found out he claimed both flat feet and heel spurs as the reason he was “rejected” from the military. He was just under the line for the Vietnam draft, so we knew that was bullshit. He had never actually wanted to go into the military so he’d never tried.
I was three days into a week’s post at a moderate sized semi-rural/suburban-ish hospital. A couple hundred beds, an ICU, crit care, med/surg floor, labor and delivery, no NICU. The kind of hospital most average Americans end up using, not the big TV style hospitals. The kind of hospital where all the staff covered an occasional shift on another floor and gossip was extremely plentiful in the halls and cafeteria, not to mention the peace garden. Why did so many of them have that peace garden? Well, it was because they were trying to use up what used to be the smokers area and give non-smokers somewhere to take a break. It always ended up being a kinda pretty useless space.
Halfway through the shift I saw a staff nurse come out of his room with a face like thunder. I noticed her hands clenched and thought “I think she’s a thrower, like me. But there is nothing to throw here and nowhere safe to throw it even if you still wanted to try.” I was in the middle of swapping a bag for my patient so I couldn’t check with her, but I made a note to see if I could find her as soon as I was done.
“Hey, you ok?” I caught her at the nurses station halfway down the hall about ten minutes later.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She smiled a small smile to punctuate her ‘fine-ness.’
“I noticed you looked … frustrated coming out of Dick’s room.” Sometimes we nurses came up with nicknames for patients to help alleviate frustration and allow us to talk a bit more freely. We’d started calling him Dick partly because he hated nicknames and partly because someone had mentioned a meme they saw that said “My boss hates when I call him Dick. Especially since his name is Steve.” Plus, it just fit him well.
She sighed. “Yeah, he’s just being exactly the same way he’s been every single second since he got here.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Anyone tell you the full story?” She knew I was a traveling nurse and might not have gotten the fullest gossip.
“Maybe not? I thought so, but you asking tells me there is more to the story.”
“Well, it surprised the hell out of us to see him in here. His wife is an unwilling frequent flyer.”
“Oh?” I asked, unsure what that meant.
“Yeah. The kind that is usually in the ER. With a spiral fracture from falling down the stairs. Or a black eye in the circular shape of a fist from walking into a door? She spent a couple days in ICU a few months back after cracking a rib and puncturing her lung but not getting any help for a couple days because he wouldn’t allow her to come in, which resulted in infection.” She sighed heavily. “She ended up in the hospital for a full week. ICU got her stabilized and well enough to move to our floor the last few days before discharge.” Looking to his door she continued, “He came in once a day at supper time, didn’t ask a single solitary thing about his wife, not one time he came in. Insisted we feed him supper. Well, he tried simply taking her meal from her, but we caught him right away and put a stop to that. But, then when we tried to get him to take his own damn self down to the cafeteria to get food he would play dumb and helpless and pawn it off on one of us.” Tapping the keyboard next to her she kept the computer awake. “Thankfully a Nurse Ratchet was on that night and clocked it right away. She was the one that finally kind of got through to the wife. I mean, she’ll never leave him. But, at least we’ve been able to confirm with her that what he does is incredibly wrong and no one would blame her if there were some kind of accident with swapped meds or a dizzy spell or something. Ya know?” I nodded, knowing exactly what she was talking about. Thinking of the meme I had seen myself on Threads a lot that said “Men just don’t get hit with cast iron pans much anymore, and it shows.”
“Lead poisoning.” I murmured.
“Exactly.” She shrugged. “So, he’s a terrible person and she’s trapped.” I murmured an acknowledgement. And for the first time in my career, honestly considered unethical options that would get my license revoked.
“Thank you for telling me.” I said, nodding to a patient visitor down the hall waving to get my attention. “If you need to vent about anything else, just let me know.” An idea forming in my mind. No guilt. No worry for eternal type consequences. Just a curiosity, first if I actually had the guts to do it and second could I figure out a way?
***
The next night I was assigned to his section of rooms. I pronounced his name correctly when I went in to introduce myself. Made sure to make a show of introducing myself to his wife and offering to get her anything she might need, a drink, a snack, a blanket, anything we could do to make her time there more comfortable. I could feel his ire at the level of fawning over her I was doing and absolute lack of fawning over him. Internally I was grinning ear to ear. Externally I was holding my most neutral face, which was a wicked resting bitchy face. I smiled and laughed with her, touching her arm to connect on something I was saying. Him I didn’t touch at all. I didn’t need to. Everything I needed to do could be done by directing him to lift his arm or simply didn’t require touching to begin with, like swapping an IV bag. My internal grin stayed as big as Montana all night. Fawning over the wife, utmost professional with him.
Then I got chatting with another nurse at the station between supper and bedtime rounds. This nurse had worked the ER for a few years and actually knew the wife. Oh the stories she had. The more she talked, the more infuriated I became. The more I thought about the cast iron pans thing. That night in the tiny hospital apartment they maintained for us traveling nurses, I sat in the overstuffed chair in front of the window and stared out at the world and tried to figure out how I might remove him from this mortal plane and keep my license and not get any kind of reprimand or mark on my record. My record up until now was absolutely spotless, but deep down I knew, if I did this, it probably wouldn’t be the last time and I couldn’t afford any blemishes that might catch someone’s eye or jeopardize my ability to continue working as a traveling nurse.
