I Am A Terrible Nurse

This isn’t the ideal setup, but I found out how to connect the keyboard from my iPad to my Android phone, and I now have the ability to blog.  There was no way I could have typed out a blog entry with my thumbs.  This small thing alone has brightened my dulling mood.

You see, I am a terrible nurse.  I am not a care giver by nature.  Oh, I’ll help you, but I will be resentful and hurried about it.  I think a lot of that is because I am afraid of hurting someone worse, and if I don’t touch them, I can’t hurt them.  The rest of it stems from how much I hate touching gross things, and getting my hands dirty.  Wound care is my idea of hell.  Having someone cough up bloody phlegm into a kleenex and then hand it to me is horrifying.  Guess what I’ve been doing.

At the hospital, it was hard, but there were real nurses there to do the things I could not force myself to do (like give a sponge bath around all the tubes sticking out of my mother’s body–oh my word.)  When I got her home, I had a very similar reaction to having brought Thor home from the hospital.  It went, “You cannot do this to me! I don’t know what I am doing!  I will accidentally kill her if you leave her in my care!”  I haven’t killed her, and haven’t even caused her significant hurt, but I’m still kind of wild-minded about the potential for damage I could cause.

My mother’s breastbone is glued and wired shut, and her chest is glued and stitched back together, and she has several other stitched up places where veins were transplanted.  She is healing well, and is doing better than I had expected, but she’s still a patient dealing with a nurse who has limited patience.

I’m pretty proud of myself that I have not lost my mind, or my temper.  Because, when you add all my ish about sick people to how much I hate for my mom to be sick, and the usual mother/daughter fun that comes of having been stuck in a small room together for 6 days, and going stir crazy from cabin fever for another 4, you have me primed for a dramatic meltdown. 

Now that I have my “space” back, in the form of being connected to my blog, I feel better.  It’s my own little bit of territory carved out, where I don’t have to worry about anyone other than myself. ME.  ALL ME!  ONLY CHILD ME!

I am so thankful my mother is alive, and I honestly don’t mind doing anything for her.  I just wish I were one of those kind people who enjoy caregiving, instead of being the kind of person who wants to just shove you out of the nest and yell, “Fly, sucker!”  My fantasy sibling loves nursing people back to healthy.