Waltz of Her Life

Early Saturday mornings on the ward were slow and relaxed, also. She greeted all her friends and co-workers and the patients who were awake and lucid at that time of the morning. As Linda made her run through first thing, the way she always liked to do, she thought she should have taken some computer classes. Tubes and wires snaked from patients into machines that whirred, buzzed and clicked, flashing neon green readouts in slots.

There was Mr. Gibson, a patient in the end stages of colon cancer. According to his daughter, whom Linda had spoken to at length during her visits, he was over seventy now but had been a high-ranking executive for an insurance company. For the past couple of weeks he'd been barely conscious and moaning lightly, like a distant wind blowing through a canyon. During the week his associates trickled through to visit and sit with him. They all wore business suits, whether male or female, mostly in dark, neutral colors. It led Linda to believe that the insurance industry must be stiflingly conservative.

That Saturday morning Mary, the Director of Nursing, came into Mr. Gibson's private room to gaze at the dizzying array of readouts and moving electronic parts. She shook her head, barely perceptibly. "This one's a regular marvel for modern American technology," she murmured, jotting a note onto his chart. To Linda, she added "Keep on your toes."

Everyone knew Mr. Gibson was reaching the end. There wasn't much for Linda to do in there anyway, other than check the bags and the flow. When she'd hired on at the Oncology department at Jewish, the personnel director said "Get used to death."

During her short career so far, she'd seen rabbis, priests and other clerical personnel perform an array of strikingly different "last rites" rituals. As often as not, a small group of family and friends would be huddled in the room at the foot of the patient's bed, consoling each other, crying. If the patient was young, say, under thirty, the mother, father, or both would wail uncontrollably as the life spirited away from their son or daughter. While the first few times had upset her, soon Linda accepted it as part of her job.

For crisis patients in the ward, there was still plenty of the type of work she'd excelled at during three years of volunteering at the Outpatient Oncology Center. The early stages of chemo often brought upon nausea and violent vomiting, and Linda was still as quick with an emesis pan as ever. Many times she offered a shoulder to cry on. A girl close to her own age cycled through once and screamed when she found clumps of her beautiful blond hair matted against her pillow in the early morning. Linda called the patient's mother and rocked her back and forth, crying along with her until the mother arrived.