Spooning My Patients

One of my patients this past week was a 19 year old young man, a victim of poor judgment and an ATV. Broken in several places and now sporting a tracheostomy tube, this young man also has a slight head injury. For him this means he'll do what you ask...for about 30 seconds...then he forgets and has to be re-directed. During my time with him he was focused on getting out of bed but, being unable to stand on his own, he wasn't allowed to. So someone had to sit with him constantly to keep reminding him to stay put.



He was a squirmer, too. He pulled things and tried to take his equipment apart. He sat up, then lied dow. He turned on his stomach. He lied at the foot of the bed. He hung his legs off the bed and then his head. We tried everything to keep him comfortable. He wasn't hurting, he told us. He wanted to drink water- but he can't because he chokes on even ice chips and would breathe liquids into his lungs if we let him drink. He was getting feedings through a tube- at least for a while until he pulled that tube out of his nose. When asked, he told me he didn't know what was wrong.



He had several episodes of diarrhea and had to be cleaned up. I know he was embarassed but he put up with 3 people in his room moving him from side to side while we cleaned his privates.



Several times he just grabbed my hand and rubbed it. He's the age of my nieces and younger than my son. I found myself rubbing his head and talking to him like I would one of my sick children.



He was tugging on my arm. I was sitting on the side of his bed. Before I realized it, I was holding this child in my arms, rubbing his head. I stopped being his nurse for a while, and became a mom. The young man settled down and went to sleep. I sat there with him for a long time, speaking softly to him, telling him he was safe and that he could go to sleep.



I went out with some friends afterwards and one of them, when he heard a colleague joke with me about 'spooning my patients' told me, "What if you had been a male nurse and that patient a female?"



WOW. He's 100% right. A male nurse probably wouldn't have done this if his patient had been a woman. Not if they're savy. Is it sexism? I do know it's the reality of the world we live in right now.



And the most common word used to describe a nurse is the word, "caring". Can a male nurse care for a patient in the very same way a female nurse can? Could a male nurse be a surrogate dad to a brain-injured young female patient?



Or should I have in a chair at the side of the bed, like they taught us in nursing school....