Some reminiscences for those of The Nephews who are young men, and for any other men who care to read them...and for mothers of sons...
When I flunked out of university with mononucleosis, Mother was the Queen of Denial. "You're young! You're healthy! You're strong! You should sign up for that geriatric care course at the community college. If we get Great-Uncle Rich-and-Childless's house we'll open it as a private nursing home for just three patients at a time, and they'll get well and go home." The course was so well subsidized we actually got some spending money after enrollment, in order to feed fresh nursing assistants into the horrible state nursing home nearby. We put in practice hours there, the twenty-some students in the class. Every one of us was female. Nobody seemed to take any notice of the fact that I was so jaundiced and haggard I scared the kids I used to baby-sit. The fact that I was single did, however, attract attention. "Since you don't have a husband to practice bathing and shaving, you get to do that for the male patients!"
The male patients suspected something like that. But, as they were gentlemen and were also hugely outnumbered, all they actually said was "Well, you've got a lot to learn."
Yes, it's possible to lift a patient who weighs twice as much as you do, if you learn the tricks. One of the tricks is to choose a patient who is either cooperative or unconscious. Another little trick of the nursing trade is to remember that almost all patients can clean their own private parts more efficiently than you can. However sloppy they are, otherwise, they'll feel the dirt there and want to get rid of it. So the female nurse hands the male patient cloth, soap, and basin, and washes his back or feet..
I didn't go to work at the horrible nursing home. My exam scores got me snapped up by a private patient, female, for whom I worked three weeks before going back to bed. After that, prospective patients and people who knew them said hopefully "You'll be teaching your sister, won't you, and your mother can get back to home nursing?" but the state law, which finally allowed parents to teach their own children, said nothing about sisters, and I watched a lot of NBC, which was still the only television channel we could pick up.
I remember, though, one friend from university who wrote that he was living with a male patient in town, as a caretaker, to save dorm fees. A male nurse! He was a Northerner and was studying to be a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher, and although I loyally disagreed with his claim that he was repulsive I found several other guys more attractive, but the idea of his being willing to sit with a male geriatric patient made him seem a lot more...respectable, anyway. The old gentlemen in the nursing home would have felt better about being bathed by him.
Anyway typing was more fun than nursing, and in those days typing paid well. In a few years, though, the'rents started to grow "old." The Veterans Administration thought Dad's eyes should be checked by a local opthalmologist who was supposed to be good. I suppose he was good, for some of his patients. Maybe it was the copper-colored skin that put him off asking whether Dad was Irish-American. The most popular chemical used to examine the eyes for cataract surgery happens to cause long-term, painful glaucoma in many patients of Irish descent. Dad went in with cataracts and came out blind. Over the years the glaucoma subsided a little; by then the cataracts were past help.
He resigned himself to the idea that an "accessible apartment" was the place for him. As a disabled veteran he got a basement flat with soft northeast light that wouldn't hurt his eyes and enough bedroom space for all of us to have moved in.
"You," Mother said to me, "are moving into the nurse's room and keeping the place cleaned until he finds his way around it. He'd rather have me, but that's just too bad. I have a job. You don't." So I stayed with Dad and mopped the floors a lot, did part-time and odd jobs, learned songs off the Limbaugh Show. It was a dreary year, but not terrible. I finally had a boyfriend who wasn't scared of Dad, and whom Dad didn't seem to be trying to scare. In fact, though he never would have said it in so many words, Dad seemed downright grateful, not only when Mother or my natural sister visited, but when his brother and cousins did.
I wondered when we'd be seeing the childhood hero who'd become Dad's closest friend. Dad didn't get to Germany until after the war, but Sergeant -- was a Purple Heart veteran of the war with Japan. Among other things he'd been on a ship that was blown up, and had a steel plate in his head. He and Dad, and sometimes a laborer from town he used to pay, had shared an all-organic vegetable farm for several summers. Sergeant -- wasn't afraid of much but, it seemed, he couldn't stand retirement projects. Later I heard that he'd told another old friend he'd gone into the building, once, but before actually ringing Dad's doorbell he decided the whole idea of a basement flat was too depressing.
At the end of the year Dad reckoned he knew the way around, and he wanted to feel free to listen to tapes if he couldn't sleep at night, and he might sleep better if my natural sister weren't alone in the house anyway, and I'd earned enough to pay off what was left of my student loan debt. So that was a good deal all around.
Not too many years later, when I stopped at the project, Dad was really ill from a reaction to his medication. I had a key, let myself in, and saw that the floors were worse than usual. Dad was in his bedroom. "Go away," he shouted through the door. "I'm not fit for female eyes to see. You can clean the floors if you really want to. Or just tell Cousin -- that he could come and see me, if he wants to. If I have to have a caretaker, which God forbid and fend, it'll be male."
Cousin -- found Dad lying in a filthy bed. "I wouldn't want my wife to have to see that," Dad told him, cooperating as the cousin threw away linens and scrubbed walls, "and I'd rather die than have my daughters see it. I know Pris has seen worse, having trained at that nursing home, but those patients were not her own father." (Well, actually, of course, he used my real-world name, which is not Priscilla, but never mind.)
Meanwhile my natural sister had eloped with a young man I would have helped Dad scare off if we'd ever got a good look at him. Mother had. "I tried to discourage her. So they eloped," she said. "Well, for one thing, he has a birth defect--he's not expected to live to age forty. She'll have a military widow's pension, at least." She also had children with disabilities. When they reached school age their father went to work in a bigger city, on a bigger-paying job, where the children could be in special school programs.
"Their father's in the hospital again. He might die," Mother said now and then over their growing-up years.
"Fine by me. Er, um, having the children back here, I mean."
But he kept coming home from the hospital and going back to his job. Time passed. The children graduated from high school, not in Virginia, but they obviously learned something. The one whose nearsightedness didn't qualify for a disability pension went down to Chick-fil-A and told the manager about his plans to stay with his frail old father, now close to age fifty, after graduation. How long he'd need to ride to work with a friend who worked at Chick-fil-A until he'd have a car, how much time his father was likely to need, what he'd been learning during the year I was doing all those guest posts about free, cheap, or at least less-overpriced online courses. The manager was impressed. My brilliant nearsighted nephew is now earning his way through university on his salary managing a restaurant, the way older people used to earn their way by washing dishes. I don't expect he'll spend enough time on campus to get his degree from M.I.T. or Georgia Tech, but I believe he could if he wanted to.
Meanwhile I lost my husband to cancer. When he started spending nights in the hospital it was in the cheerful neurology section; I slept with my head on the side of the hospital bed, sitting in a straight-backed chair. Then there was a stay in the urology section. "We can't have women visitors overnight. It makes the other men too uncomfortable. Aren't there any male relatives who could stay with him at night?" There were two; they were called, they made short visits during the daytime, but neither of them stayed with my husband at night. Well. Soon enough he was on the cancer ward and didn't know who was with him any more.
I came home and met a man who was tall, dark, and handsome, at the time. As of this year he also qualifies as old, sick, and rich: best of show in all categories. I met him on a job, liked working with him, liked chatting with him at lunch, and soon started seeing him after work. During the first year I agreed to marry him as soon as his teenaged foster son moved out, because teenaged boys didn't need foster stepmothers.
As regular readers know, the foster son moved out. About a month later, the foster father had Lyme Disease. The foster son came back. Lyme Disease wasn't properly treated in time, and became chronic. Some days my Significant Other has been fit to walk or drive, some days not. When he's not, he's expressed a preference for me to do at least some of the driving, and I went so far as to acquire the sort of big macho-looking truck in which he's comfortable, but mostly the foster son has done the driving, the cleaning, and whatever else needed to be done.
Sinetunes I think, "I ought to be doing more for him." Then I think about the trick to carrying a patient who is bigger than you are. Anybody can carry anybody, if they have to get out of a burning building, at close to their top speed, without great strain. If the situation is less life-threatening than a burning building, patients hate being carried that way. Having their feet drag on the ground hurts. A 6'3" man can do more for a 6'4" man than a 5'4" woman can do. That's all there is to it.
The only truly practical advantage being male can be said to provide, relative to most of the jobs people do, is size. Male athletes are disproportionately stronger and faster than female athletes. Male hormones can help build more efficient muscles, for as long as the man trains and uses his muscles. Male couch potatoes are neither stronger nor faster than women the same size, but they can still reach further and lift heavier weights. Size should not be underestimated as an advantage in providing nursing care.
But some men, the ones who aren't too lazy or grumpy or perverse to work in human-service jobs, also enjoy a psychological advantage in working with other males. How many times, in adult and supplemental education classes, I've seen a man or boy seem bright, charming, but unable to focus and learn the material.
Sometimes it's not just any male teacher who can help. I remember telling my husband about a problem student whose real name was Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson had been homeless but he could be described as handsome and thought he was very cool and charming. "The way I see it, Mr. Johnson may never get anywhere with me or the other woman teacher, because he's too busy posing and preening and trying to look attractive. He's not getting anywhere with the two young Black men teachers, because they're younger and he's trying to act 'smarter' than they are. He's not getting anywhere with the older White man, because he's trying to act tough and defensive. I think his only hope of earning that G.E.D. would be to have a tutor who is older and darker-skinned than he is. Then he might possibly think about anything but what kind of impression he was making long enough to learn the multiplication table" My husband came in to tutor, and Mr. Johnson earned his G.E.D. in five weeks.
My husband had a gift. However, it seems generally to boost male students' morale when at least some of their teachers are male. Likewise, male customers are more comfortable buying things in stores that are co-owned by or that at least employ men. Likewise, male patients seem less miserable being cared for by male doctors and nurses.
So why are there so few males in the health care professions? Men still compete for top positions as doctors, but they're not proportionately represented in other health care fields. Least of all do they seem interested in the lowly nursing assistants' jobs. Doctors and nurses don't even call nursing assistants "Nurse," though patients usually do. In hospitals nursing assistants are paid by the hour and are the ones most likely to bathe patients and clean bedpans. Male patients, who might not mind having women help them bathe when they're healthy, often hate having women help them bathe when they're ill. A good male nurse can always find work, and may be able to choose among private home care jobs with all sorts of unenumerated benefits. A surprising number of men pass up these benefits because:
* they faint at the sight of blood
* they feel sick at the sight of body secretions, generally
* they feel awkward around sick people
* stupid insensitive hospital or nursing home policies might require them to bathe women, which is just too icky for all concerned (this one is true); or
* they find being around sick people unbearably depressing, or frightening, or both.
Do men still believe that "manliness" presupposes fortitude? Fortitude is the solution to at least four of these problems men have with doing the jobs that could get financing their education.
Nursing is not for just any guy. It does require that a man have grown into his feet and become able to move efficiently in his full-grown body. It requires that he have matured enough not to go into the sort of clown act little boys use when they feel scared or embarrassed. It requires that he cultivate what Christians call the "servant's heart," the gift of humility, necessary to allow him to work with both doctors and patients as superordinates. It requires more strength and stamina, keener perceptivity, and a more robust immune system, than most people think. It requires the ability to treat strangers, for no reason but their illness, as if they were part of your own body--to snap out of a sound sleep and take them to the bathroom, or bring them a basin or bedpan, or whatever, half a dozen times in a night--and then detach from them completely, as they either die or recover, and on to the next one. A good male nurse has to be, in short, a good man.
But the rewards are great--especially when a fellow can pay back what he owes his father, or father-substitute, in this lifetime.
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