Sometimes, A Red Popsicle Is Best Answer
There is a miserable moaning coming from the den. It sounds like an old, snaggletoothed tiger in the final stages of a root canal. I draw up my courage to open the door.
It’s worse than I thought. My sick husband, a very reluctant patient, is languishing on the sofa. He has lost the remote.
I, being the nurse from hell, root around in his covers to retrieve it. I plump his pillows a bit too vigorously and ask, praying that the answer is no, if he needs anything.
He looks at me beseechingly and says, “Just a red Popsicle, please. And maybe some cinnamon toast, with not too much butter. And, oh yes, the sports page and another pair of socks, cotton, not wool, and probably my prescription too. Isn’t it about time for my next dose?”
I’m quite sure that it’s time for a dose of something - patience, forbearance, a muzzle - but I smile in my best Nurse Ratched way and go upstairs to get the toast. It’s the least I can do. Given my caregiving style, it’s also probably the best I can do.
We all have a personal style when it comes to dealing with everyday ailments, and our responses often hinge on whether we are giving or receiving the care. Some people make really good patients, others, exceptional caregivers. Rarely do they occupy the same body.
From years of careful study, I have come up with four basic patient styles: the Wilting CamilIe, the Big Baby, the Trapped Wolverine and the Saint.
The Wilting Camille loves fainting couches. Like Norma Desmond, the drama queen of Sunset Boulevard, these patients are waiting for their close-ups. They love the theatrics of illness, imagining themselves, with their head colds, to be next week’s star of “E.R.” Clearly, none of them has ever been forced to use a bedpan.
The Big Baby is almost never sick and usually requires a doctor’s orders to stay in bed. But once there, it’s show time, folks. The words “I’m really sick” are said at first incredulously, then with increasing conviction and frequency until everyone in the household is certain of impending doom. About the time everyone else is infected with the same bug, the Big Baby goes blissfully back to work.
Trapped Wolverines hate even admitting to being sick. They react to a thermometer like a cattle prod. They are skeptical of all cures, make faces when and if they accept their medicine and question the prescribing physician’s credentials. In our family, all the doctors and nurses pretty much fall into this category.
The Saint takes all medication as prescribed, does not indulge in excessive whining and sleeps a lot. In short, the perfect patient. At least for Nurse Ratched.
Nurse Ratched, the highly civilized dominatrix of Ken Kesey’s book, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” likes her patients docile, even slack-jawed. She encourages patients not to make too much of a severed limb.
She is one of four general types of caregivers. The others are Chicken Little, Commissar Entrails, and The Saint.
Chicken Littles squawk around the ailing person at the first sign of sniffles. They check temperatures every 30 minutes and can tell you exactly what every major entertainer has died of in the last 10 years. They get their medical news from the National Enquirer.
The Commissar is fascinated by how much, how often, color, and consistency. And that’s just the Kleenex.
The Saint lets you stay home from school or work, knows just the way you like your cocoa, and when to heat up the Campbell’s Soup. Saints says things like “poor thing, you just rest now,” then leave you to watch your favorite movie even if it’s the third time that morning you’ve watched “Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy”.
In a perfect world we would get the patient and the caregiver we deserve. Saints would care for saints, Ratcheds would care for Wolverines.
Come to think of it, at least at our house, we’re pretty close to heaven now.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Corkery Spencer The Spokesman-Review