Disclaimer: This blog post reflects the author’s present recollection over time. Characters and dialogue have been recreated and rearranged. Events have been fictionalized and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

“It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone in ten minutes of casual conversation.”

The doors swing open. I bustle through, the tails of my short white coat fluttering behind me. It is my first day as a medical student in this hospital and I’ve been sent to see Mrs. “W”. I look around, a little lost, and hope that I’ve finally found the right floor. The nurse sitting at the desk looks up. Her eyes are very large and very blue.

“Welcome to the floor!” she says, with amazing cheer for seven o’clock in the morning.

I freeze in my tracks.

“Thank you,” I say.

Her wide, blue eyes continue to stare at me. Her lips are smiling, curved in a pink, plastic smile like a Barbie doll. I feel like an unwelcome intruder, a lost third-year medical student playing doctor and invading the daily churn and flow of the unit. And so I continue, stuttering nervously over my words.

“I-I’m here to see a patient.”

“Thank you for coming to see our patient!” she says.

Her enthusiasm remains unflagging. I introduce myself and mumble a few somewhat coherent sentences like Where-Is-Room-12? and something about the weather and Have-A-Nice-Day! Eventually I find my way to the patient.

Mrs. W is a thin 60-something-year-old woman with COPD (causing shortness of breath) and venous insufficiency (which causes severe pain in her legs) who, well, also does a bit of cocaine every now and then. While she came to the hospital for breathing problems, her primary complaint is her leg pain. She has been scheduled for an outpatient vascular surgery clinic. But until then, she must live with the pain. We discuss the benefits of walking.

“I know it’s hard to exercise in the hospital, but walking would really help,” I tell her.

“Maybe if I had someone to walk with,” she says.

And so that’s how it began. In the afternoon after rounds, I return to her room. We walk two laps around the unit together. She is surprisingly steady on her feet, requiring no assistance, though occasionally she leans against the wall and stops due to pain. And in those ten short minutes, I learn about her. She tells me about her children, two of whom live hundreds of miles away and are too busy to see her. The third is jobless and lives with her at home and helps her “sometimes” around the house. She tells me of how she used to work long days as a single mother to support the family. And how she struggled to quit smoking and finally stopped a few years ago, but hasn’t been able to quit the cocaine.

“I tell myself it’s the last time every time,” she says. “Then I have a bad day and I just do it. I know I gotta stop ’cause it’s bad for my heart, but deep down, I guess I’m not ready yet.”

It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone in ten minutes of casual conversation.

The next day, I am unable to return to her room until much later in the day. She nearly tumbles out of bed when she sees me.

“I thought you forgot about me,” she says.

“Of course not!” I reply.

After I ask about her day, she asks about mine. I share a little about my life. The astounding (but ever shrinking!) number of years of future education that I had yet to traverse. That no, I am not married, but I am in a long-term relationship with my boyfriend. And I tell her some silly things, like how I had ran through the pounding rain that morning and dropped my phone in a puddle. And somehow, it still works!

The nurses notice. They exclaim over how great Mrs. W looks. The exercise put some color in her cheeks, they say. And she is walking so well and so steady on her feet! They dote on her with genuine affection and when they turn to look at me, I can see their gratitude.

We manage to walk three laps.

“Maybe tomorrow we can walk four,” Mrs. W says with a smile.

When I leave that day, the blue-eyed nurse stops me in the hall.

“Thank you for walking with our patient!” she says, with her ever-present cheer.

This time, I smile back.

Today’s Daily Post Writing Prompt: Ten