The Art of Nursing
By Colman McCarthy
In December 1966 in Washington I met a nurse named Mavourneen Deegan. She was 26, I was 28. Weeks later, against the advice of some cautious ones, we married. Get to know her, I was told by the go-slowers But what I did know—from her stories as a nursing student at Georgetown University, then as an operating room nurse at Greenwich (CT) Hospital and then in the labor and delivery room at Columbia Womens Hospital in Washington—was ample. She was in love with nursing, which went a long way, besides her Irish grace and good looks, to make her loveable to me.
It would be 38 years and three grown children later that I would really know—experientially, emotionally and spiritually—the full story of Mavourneen’s gifts for nursing competence and compassion. I had become her patient.
Coming home from my daily bicycle commute this past May I crashed while taking my Raleigh 3-speed around a tight corner on wet pavement. And going slowly, at that. My left ankle broke, casting me, a former marathoner but still a daily exerciser, among the lame and the halt. Following surgery and a hospital stay of four days, I came home. Mavourneen—a Gaelic name meaning “my darling”—became my private duty nurse, on call 24 hours.
No IVs, no chartings, no high-tech monitorings and certainly no low-tech temperature takings would be needed to mend a fractured tibia. Only the basic arts of nursing, ones so ordinary that hospital orderlies might refuse but which a genuine nurse instinctively embraces.
Handling me required, first off, daily rub downs of my bruised ego. My crash came about the same time that both George W. Bush and John Kerry tumbled off their bikes. Neither was half the athlete I am—pardon the preen but 18 marathons allows it--yet they rose with only scratches and there I was bedridden, scarred and out of even mild action for months.
The habituality of Mavourneen’s daily nursing came out in expressions of love that neither Aetna, Medicare or AARP Medigap could cover in million dollar reimbursements. She managed the rare trick of being both professional and personal. There were the morning deliveries of fresh shirts, the changing of sheets, the emptying of bedpans, cooking meals, placing pillows at the end of the bed to keep my foot up, hauling soap, water and towels to my bed for the morning bath, cooking and bringing food, taking phone calls—I wasn’t missing all the action—checking with the orthopedist, and all the while keeping the house going. It was the dailyness of it all, so routine as to be unnoticed—unless you knew, as I did, how essential it was. After three weeks, it was rehab lessons: using a walker, crutches, mounting stairs. Her encouragements were note-perfect: I’d be walking soon enough.
This wasn’t life-or death nursing. It was life-and-life, mine and hers, which it had been all along in our 38 years together but was now a revelation to me. The woman I love infinitely was showing her love in the most finite of ways: unglamorous nursing, so fundamental that its beauty and tenderness could easily be missed.
Just as I might have missed out on Mavourneen when I first met her, had I not listened to her stories of nursing.
Colman McCarthy, a former columnist for The Washington Post, directs the Center for Teaching Peace, in Washington DC. He teaches courses on nonviolence at four universities and three high schools.
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(202) 537-1372 cmccarthy@starpower.net