Home Visits- November 6, 2002
It is day two at the Scotland Neck Clinic and today around 9 am five women piled into a minivan. The minivan is a family van complete with toys, old candy wrappers, and various other necessities of the suburban family. It is the personal van of one of the nurses who works at the clinic. The five women include a pharmacist, nurse, physician’s assistant, and two pharmacy students. It was a cold morning, and it looked as if it was going to rain. To be completely honest, I was not looking forward to whatever came next.
The first house we arrived at was held together with Duct tape on the floor and string to hold the door together. We walked into the back room and it was so warm. There was a big metal stove in the middle with two beds in front of it and an elderly woman in a rocking chair to the left of it. She was squinting to see us and straining her ears to hear us. She called the nurse “ma” which was disconcerting. Did she think the nurse was her mother? I don’t think we introduced ourselves so maybe she just defaulted to calling other women “ma”? It didn’t make sense to me and then she upset everyone when the nurse taking her blood she said “ma, ma, you are hurting me”. When that was over, we had to ask, do you want us to try and keep you alive if something were to happen? “Yes, I am not ready to go”. This question was asked of every patient we saw today. The first patient was the only one who wanted to be kept alive. During my brief time in Area L so far, I have been forced to think about death more than I ever have in my entire life. It has become clear to me that no matter what happens and no matter what school you went to and what technology and medications are available, ultimately death is out of everyone’s hands. There is something else in charge of death and they are not an employee. We have to ask if the patients want to be kept alive even by a machine. The first lady says again “yes, I ain’t ready to go”.
I am not clear on what is expected of me during these home visits. I don’t have questions to ask or blood to draw so mostly I am taking in the décor and each house we stepped in today was so warm and different. We saw all women patients today and with the exception of one the desired dress code was slippers, nightgowns, sweatsuits, or a combination. This is foreign to me because growing up my parents always got dressed up for the day complete with their outside shoes on inside and didn’t take them off until it was time to go to bed. I never saw them in sneakers never mind slippers and certainly not when people were coming over. These women were all happy to see us and one even gave us all hugs. They welcomed us into their homes and wanted us to sit as they eagerly told us about their health problems and we were just as eager to listen to whatever they had to tell us. We hung on every word and documented the entire experience. Again, it was not documented by me, but it was documented. I listened and nodded and looked around taking in all the ways people lived and all the different things they surrounded themselves with. Elvis is still king along with Jesus of course and floral couches. We ended up singing happy birthday at one house. We all got sad together at one house and all laughed together at another.
We ended the day when we walked into the house of a 97-year-old woman who had a terrible sounding cough who told us not to worry, it was just a cold, but the experienced health care providers around me knew better. I have never seen it done before but somehow these women knew it could be done so we all gathered around her and then carried this woman still sitting in her kitchen chair to the minivan. The plan was to take her straight to the hospital. I forgot to tell you that on our way to see her, the nurse had gotten a call warning her that there was a murderer on the loose in the town we were headed to. So, on the way to the hospital, we were all in the minivan feeling lucky that we not only avoided all being murdered but thankful we were able to get the 97-year-old woman sitting among us in her kitchen chair some much-needed medical attention for her “cold” that was actually pneumonia.
En route to the hospital we passed an accident involving a cotton truck and there was so much cotton on the road and floating through the sky it looked like it was snowing. It is not every day that you avoid the car wreck and a murderer and get to sing happy birthday to a stranger and laugh and cry with other strangers and successfully carry a 97-year-old woman out of her house. It made me feel happy to be alive, a pharmacy student, and a woman, but most importantly to know that sometimes superheroes drive around in dirty minivans.