The Two Kinds of Decay

Color

After I left the hospital with my permanent line, a nurse visited me at my parents’ house every two days.

She (or, rarely, he) made a sterile field on the table next to me and peeled the seal of the patch covering the dressing on the entry site, and lifted the dressing. On the first day I said it itches and the nurse asked where and I said I didn’t know because I wouldn’t look at it with the bandage off. There were eight shallow stitch wounds below the big wound, in-and-out times four, but I didn’t know that yet, and I could not touch the itch or point to it as it was in a sterile field, but the nurse hit the itch with a swab on the first try, and when I cried in relief she kept hitting it and I kept crying.

The stitches lasted eleven and a half months, which was as long as they needed to last before the line was removed.

This line was a Hickman line — the catheter entered the target vein but was first tunneled under the skin for a few inches, so the open wound was only a skin wound. This reduced the risk of infection. The hole in the vein was protected by my skin.

Every two days the visiting nurse flushed the line and dressed the wound and filled out a one-page summary form.

One of the categories in the summary was Color. For a while I didn’t look at the copy of the form the nurse left in the white loose-leaf binder that had been provided by the home nursing organization. But then I did and saw that for the first two weeks I’d been home, the nurse had written the word pale on the line next to the word Color.

The next time she came, I protested when I saw her write the word pale. But she wouldn’t change it.

The next time she came — she didn’t come again. It was a new nurse, Fran. I told her, as she began to fill out the form, that the other nurse had written that I was pale, but that I’d always been pale, and that I wasn’t anemic, and I was already taking so much iron I was almost completely unable to have bowel movements, even when I chased the iron pills with a double dose of stool softener.

Fran listened to me and wrote patient is naturally pale on the line next to Color and filed a copy of the form behind the ones the other nurse had left, and every time after that, she just put a check mark in the Color box to denote that my color was fine.

Fran was my favorite.