Kissing

Yesterday I kissed my patient. I have been a nurse for almost 18 years and it was a first for me. I do believe in the power of touch and I have held many a hand and wiped both dead and feverish brows, but never had I kissed a patient. I am not a touchy-feely kind of girl and I strongly believe in the "professional presentation" of nursing. But yesterday, I kissed an 87 year old man on the forehead. It wasn't his birthday and he wasn't dying, but he had been asking me to kiss him every day for a week and giving me the most beautiful smile whenever I would bathe him, turn him to prevent pressure ulcers, or give him his sickly pink paste of medicines crushed into applesauce. Then, after a week of his not being able to safely eat from dysphagia that would promptly deposit most foods into his lungs, I assisted a surgeon in bridling him with red robinson catheters.  Through each nare we twisted those large tubes that then were pulled out his mouth, sutured together, clipped short, and turned around to form a red rubber ring. To this a Keofeed tube could be tied that he would never be able to pull out. He cried and coughed, turned blue and batted at us, but there was no family to help us decide what to do and he had been SO hungry all week. I had been the one to passionately tell the doctors that we must somehow feed this man and, so, a surgeon who wasn't even on the case heard me from his dictation desk and volunteered to bridle my patient.

After the procedure, after I had put away the unused sutures and kelly clamps, the patient looked at me and managed to smile again. At me, the nurse who had initiated this procedure that turned a lovely gentleman into a bull. All I could do WAS kiss him.