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You will learn here that life isn’t always as easy as it seems. Your first day you’ll board the elevator on the bottom floor, go up to the seventh, follow the “Pediatric Oncology” signs and hold your breath at the smell of institutional food and the air freshener trying to mask it. Looking for the nurses’ station you’ll pass fifteen rooms, all with closed doors and construction paper name-plates that scream in bright colors the names of the children. They’ll reflect off the tile floors and sting your eyes; they’re too bright at first. You will create images of these rooms—IV poles, Emerson’s basins, as well as bald heads, sunken eyes, sobbing parents, and confused children.
When you reach the nurses’ station three sets of unsmiling eyes will look back at you. You’ll be handed your peach scrubs. Wear them. They’re mandatory. Peach has been determined to be a positive color and here, it’s all about having a positive outlook. Those three sets of eyes will be your closest friends and your worst enemies in Peds. They will teach you the ropes. So listen to them as they chat after rounds, laugh in the quiet time of night, and sob when someone relapses, afraid of the threatening of cells that have gotten out of control.
The ward is filled with reflections of the need for positivity. The playroom, which is the size of three double patient rooms, is placed in between the fifteen rooms, eight on one side, seven on the other. It has bright walls of yellow, blue, and red. The primary colors were deemed gender neutral yet uplifting enough to calm and engage the children. As the new nurse you will have to organize the room at its closing time each night. At nine o’clock you will pick up the countless Barbies, GI Joes, Dora the Explorer, and Power Ranger dolls. They will go into their respective bins with the gold plaques that say things like “In Memory of…” The trim around the ceiling shows dancing animals. The lions roar and shake their manes, the elephants hold balloons to pass out to the other animals, and the zebras laugh and do cartwheels.
The doctors and nurses of the hospital have dubbed this wing “The Circus” after the bright room and the chaos that surrounds the department. The nurses are the ringmasters and the doctors the animal trainers, the children are the acts. The children are examined, prodded, and trained as if they were not humans but animals in a circus. They are trained to sit still, to open their mouths on command; the children are the showcases.
“It’s a teaching hospital,” the doctors say, the ultimate excuse. But the oldest nurse, Betsy, will chide the interns and new first year residents as they stare at the children’s charts and never speak directly to them You are these children’s advocate; learn to resist teaching them like the elephants, lions, and zebras of the circus. The only animals are paintings.
Betsy will smile after you put on your scrubs, comment on the color of your hair. Her eyes are the kindest of the three. Soft blue, they are wide and open to all. Her eyes remind you of a doe’s. The children will ask for her when you poke too many times as you try to find a vein that hasn’t collapsed, holding back tears because she has told them to “be nice to the new nurse.” She smiles at the kids all the time, her teeth as white as a toothpaste commercial. Occasionally, in the rush to look good for the kids, she’ll have lipstick smeared on her teeth. Don’t say anything; the children never do.
Betsy loves this job, though it’s worn at her nerves for years. At times, you’ll see her hands shake when she drinks her morning tea, but they never quiver when drawing from a port or holding a girl’s hair as she vomits her chemo. The kids call her “Mamma B.” Betsy’s lab coat—only she wears one—is always hiding a sticker or a sucker or some kind of treat. You’ll follow her the first month or two, watching in awe as a six-year-old child laughs at her through his violent chills.
Slowly you will learn that Betsy has her secrets. They’re whispered in the cafeteria. They are the sideways glances on the elevator. Even some of the older children, who’ve been here longer, gossip about it in the chemo room. You’ll catch bits and pieces of these conversations. Betsy’s husband killed himself, a single gunshot wound to the head. Betsy found him on the kitchen floor. You’ll listen in horror as the nurse’s assistants tell you it was a .38. He left a note on the table—“I can’t deal with the death anymore. It’s everywhere, she brings it home.” You’ll learn that this unit affects more than the nurses within it. One day, you’ll come across Betsy crying in the drug lockup. She’ll sniffle and shake her head, smile at you. You’ll understand.
Ellie is the youngest nurse, right out of nursing school. She has three kids of her own. Sometimes you’ll see them in the playroom with the patients, their dark curly hair standing out against the white flesh of the other children. Her eyes are dark brown. “The abyss,” the other nurses call them. A few of the children can’t look her in the eye. Ellie’s eyes are the kind that when you look at them you feel they bore into your soul. The younger children, just becoming accustomed to conversation, will dart their gaze back and forth, looking for a spot to look at that is less intense. Ellie can tell when the children are lying, when they’re fake crying for attention, or when they’re suppressing pain to be strong.
She brings the toy cart around every morning before lab work and chemo and doctor visits. Each child gets to pick a properly sanitized, thoroughly washed animal from the cart each day to “be his friend.” Toys from home are not allowed in Peds. Germs are everyone’s worst fear. Ellie also teaches the children how to wash their hands before and after dinner when they get here. Thirty seconds of soap, rub rub rub, rinse rinse rinse, repeat. The younger ones chant it every night and you can hear the hum of their collective voices after dinner, their mantra is the reminder that they’re still there.
Betsy and Ellie drink tea every morning with each other. It is a ritual that none of the other nurses have ever been able to penetrate. When Ellie came to Peds she was in a “bad place,” as they both refer to it. She is married to an autoworker with a drinking problem; you learn that he beat her, though he never touched the children. Ellie sits with you at lunch occasionally, when Betsy has her day off or can’t come into work. She’ll smile shyly at your polite conversation and banter about certain patients that you have in common.
“You should’ve seen what Nicholas did the other day,” you say, feigning enthusiasm. “Even after his induction he was smiling and laughing, playing with his brother. The gown was too big for Vinnie and Nicholas couldn’t get over his little brother tripping and catching the bottom of it.” You’ll chuckle to yourself. Ellie will smile and nod.
“Nick is a good boy,” she’ll say in
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