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Never Change - Softcover

Berg, Elizabeth

 
9780743411332: Never Change
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743411331 ISBN 13: 9780743411332
Verlag: Washington Square Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinski is reasonably content with her quiet life, her dog, Frank, and her career as a visiting nurse. But everything changes when Chip Reardon, the golden boy she adored in high school, is assigned as her new patient. Choosing to forgo treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned to his New England hometown to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poignant redefinition of roles, and a complicated dance of memory, ambivalence, and longing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Berg is the award-winning author of more than twenty-five books, including the New York Times bestsellers True to Form, Never Change, Open House, The Story of Arthur Truluv, Night of Miracles, and The Confession Club. She lives outside of Chicago. Find out more at Elizabeth-Berg.net.

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Chapter One

You know people like me. I'm the one who sat on a folding chair out in the hall with a cigar box on my lap, selling tickets to the prom, but never going -- even though in the late sixties only nerds went to proms. But I would have gone. I would have happily gone; I would have been so happy. I wanted the phone call with the rough voice asking "Would you...?" I wanted to finger row after row of pastel dresses in silks and chiffons -- their sweetheart necks, their wide ribbon ties. I wanted to have some shoes dyed; I thought it was a miracle they could do it. I wanted to put a wrist corsage in my refrigerator, lock the bathroom door, and bathe in perfumed water with rollers in my hair and the transistor at the edge of the sink blaring "Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch." I wanted to allow an hour for the application of all my new Maybelline, suffer the flash-bulbs of my parents' eager camera, stay out all night, and eat breakfast before I came home, bleary-eyed and in the know.

I didn't get asked. I never once got asked. Not to proms, not to lesser dances, not to movies, not to parties, not for shopping with the girls.

I would get talked to, though. I mean beyond the "Hi!"s in the hall, beyond the preoccupied chatter in the lunchroom. I got talked to a lot. They would call me on the phone, the pretty girls. They would call and talk to me about things that were serious: their parents' alcoholism. Their hidden scoliosis. Their possible pregnancies. They talked to me because I knew how to listen, and I gave good advice. I didn't have a lot of personal experience, but I knew things, because I read and I watched. That is what there was for me. Those girls talked to me -- and a boy, once, too -- because they knew I would never betray them. Of course they betrayed me constantly. But they didn't really mean to. Probably they didn't know. They didn't think about it that much.

I'm the one everybody liked, Myra Lipinski, oh yeah, Myra, she's nice, the one that everybody liked and no one wanted to be with. The odd shape. The socks, those socks -- well, her parents had accents. The face, unfortunate, with its too small eyes, its too wide mouth. The hair mousy brown, too thin and straight, greasy after half a day, no matter what. Even as a five-year-old: the aunt and uncle who once came to visit, sitting with my mother at the kitchen table, chatting quietly in Polish, and smiling over at me. "What are they saying?" I asked my mother, coming over to stretch myself out across her lap and shyly smiling back at them. "What are they saying about me?" And my mother finally breaking into English to tell me, "They say you look like...your father. And now we are not anymore talking about you." I lay still in her lap, contemplating the yellow-and-orange pattern of her apron and forbidding myself my thumb, until she crossed her legs and dislodged me.

So. I sold the tickets and I decorated the gym and I helped win the volleyball games and I sang a good alto in the choir and I lent my notes to anyone who asked; and if people wanted to copy from my test paper, I let them do that, too. I did not become bitter. I don't know why. Maybe I didn't think I had the right.

After graduation, I stayed here in Ashton, venturing no further than the twenty-two miles necessary to get to Boston College, where I earned my BSN. I went to nursing school because I knew it would be a way for people to love me. And for me to love them, too. This happens in illness. The sad plates of armor separate; the light comes in.

At first, I worked in the intensive care unit. I wanted the challenge and the prestige of working in the hardest place. You're eating lunch in the cafeteria, wearing your scrubs, your high-tech stethoscope around your neck, a hemostat clipped onto you somewhere, tourniquets tied onto it. You know a long list of lab values cold; you could intubate if you had to; you can rate heart murmurs and evaluate lung status and draw blood and start IVs better than most of the attending physicians. You see a burst of ventricular tachycardia race across a monitor screen and you save the patient and let the doctor know about it when you get around to it. You can give a lot of drugs that nurses on other floors can't. You can decide when to get certain kinds of tests performed. When you call down to any other department in the hospital and say, "This is ICU," they pay attention. You come first. When you say stat, it gets done stat.

So you're eating lunch and a code is called over the loudspeaker, and you get up and run back to the unit. It's likely you'll be needed, no matter where in the hospital the arrest occurred. The other people in the cafeteria watch you leave your bowl of soup sitting there, and they nod at you as you pass by. In the army of nurses, you wear four stars.

The pay is pretty good, too, especially for a single woman with no obligations -- only child with no children, parents dead. I bought a little two-bedroom house a couple of blocks from the center of town. I bought a Porsche Carrera 911, too. Black, tan leather interior. Incredible sound system. The boys look when I pull up next to them; then look away. I beat them off the line, every time.

The problem with intensive care is that the patients usually can't speak. They're on respirators. Or they're unconscious. Or they have such messed up chemistry that they're confused. Or they stay just until they're stabilized, and then they're out of there and another train wreck comes in. That's what the bad cases are called: train wrecks. It doesn't mean what it sounds like. What it means is: right now, I can't get close to you, you're halfway to death. And anyway, I don't have time.

So there's no opportunity, in the unit, to sit at the side of the bed and shoot the breeze with patients. To get to know them. To admire pictures of their children, to style their hair, to slowly help them eat. Not that many of them eat. Tubes. I know a nurse who works in the unit precisely because the patients don't eat. "I didn't go to four years of nursing school to load mashed potatoes onto a fork," she says. But I like feeding people. It doesn't feel demeaning. It feels like high privilege.

The best day I had in the unit came when we had a boarder, someone who couldn't get put onto the floor where she belonged; it was full. She ate. She sat up in a chair. She was oriented to time, place, and person. She dug in her purse for lipstick after her bath. The unit was light that day; she was my only patient. She told me she had a crush on her doctor -- no surprise, everyone had a crush on Dr. LaGuardia, with his dark, South American looks -- so I told her I'd curl her hair, and she'd look beautiful when he came to visit her. We used 4 x 4 gauze pads to make rag rollers, and she did look beautiful when he came. I stopped him outside her cubicle, told him to be sure he noticed her hairdo. He's a good guy, Dr. LaGuardia. He walked in the room and stopped dead in his tracks. "Where was the beauty contest?" he asked, in the accent you could feel in your knees. "Where's the trophy?" Then he told her she could transfer to her floor now, there was a bed available; and twenty minutes later I was taking care of a gray-faced man with multisystem failure.

I stayed working in the unit for a long time. I mixed drugs, counted drops, monitored machines, resuscitated people who arrested, then resuscitated them again when they arrested half an hour later. I rarely had enough time to talk to their distraught family members. I had to walk away from their sad, worried clusters; I had to go and milk chest tubes while they wept and talked in church-quiet voices.

Oftentimes, I worked in my dreams. I heard the beep-beep of the IV telling me the infusion was completed, the rhythmic sighs of the ventilator, the dull bong of the alarm on...

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Verlag
Washington Square Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743411331
ISBN 13 
9780743411332
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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Verantwortliche Person
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