Christmas Eve Home Health Adventures

Nurses have to work on holidays.   This is a given.  While the rest of the world celebrates Christmas, Nurses show up for patient care because sickness doesn’t take holidays.  As a home health nurse, the week of Christmas is usually one of the busiest times of the year because hospitals and nursing homes do the annual Christmas “dump” of patients – most of whom aren’t really well enough or stable enough to go home yet – but the facilities have minimal staffing for the Holidays as well – so they discharge anyone and everyone they can.    So home care nurses are often over-worked and saddled with patients who have no business being at home in the first place.  

Cue the scene:   It’s Christmas Eve in the late 1990's…..a foggy, chilly day in Chattanooga – foggier still along the banks of the Tennessee River.  I have a busy schedule of 8 patients to see – strewn across approximately 200 miles of Hamilton County.   It’s late afternoon and I’m heading up to see a patient in Possum Creek, TN.  Yes, it  is a real place.  No, I’m not making it up.   Possum Creek is north of Soddy Daisy, but south of Bakewell – situated in one of the most beautiful, scenic areas in Northern Hamilton county.  It is a very rural area – no stop-light even.  No Wal-mart.  Not even a McDonalds.    Just pretty countryside, lots of forests, and a stretch of pristine lake-front fishing spots.  I enjoy seeing patients in Possum Creek because of the lack of traffic, the friendliness of the folks who live there, and the breath-taking beauty and scenic views.  The fog settling in over the landscape made the scene particularly beautiful just before Christmas.

This particular Christmas Eve, I was driving out to see a patient who lived at the end of a long and winding road;  the road was paved – but not well maintained.  Pot-holes made for a bumpy ride.  The fog drifted in and out across the road in lower lying areas in patches and it was a frosty kind of afternoon.  Very pretty, but cold.   I made it to my patient’s house.  She lived in a ramshackle little white house with a carport on one side and lots of trees.  There were car parts, boxes of stuff, and broken down cars dotting the back and side yards and car port.   The patient had some pretty bad arterial wounds on both of her feet and just come back from a prolonged hospital stay. 

 

While she was in the hospital, she had a bit of a “home invasion” situation….someone had broken into her home, ransacked the kitchen – spilling out all of the cornflakes out of the box, across the table and onto the floor;' they also knocked over the flour canister, ripped up the upholstering on her kitchen chairs, chewed on some wires to the telephone, and had defecated and urinated on almost every visible surface.   The marauding bandits were a family of brave raccoons.  Their masked faces and ringed-tails making them look like escaped prisoners indeed.  My little patient never missed a beat.  She just looked at me from under hooded, wrinkled eyes after relating the tale of woe and said, “You ain’t never smelt nuthin’ more nasty than coon piss in yer kitchen.”  I guess not. 

 

She was a woman of few words; slow to speak, thoughtful about what she was going to say.  As back-woods country as the day is long, but sweeter than the sugar the raccoons had strewn about the kitchen floor.  I enjoyed seeing her and enjoyed her country wisdom.

As our visit progressed, I was changing the bandages on the extensive wounds to her feet and she was tolerating it fairly well, given the amount of pain it caused her.  We were almost finished when her brother opened up the screen door near us, holding up a bloody stump of a dead squirrel.  He said, “Sissy, If’en I skin this here squirrel, will you cook us up some dumplins to go with ‘em?” 

My little patient was slow to respond, looking at him for a long, hard minute before she drawled, “Earl, whar’d you get that squirrel?” 

He answered very quickly, “I was on my ways over here and the truck in front of me hit ‘em!  I know he was fresh because when I got to ‘em, he was still a jerkin and I had to knock him in the head with a wrench to kill ‘em.”  

My patient shakes her head that she understands and slowly responds, “Yeah, I reckon I’ll cook him and make up some dumplins fer dinner.”

I was fascinated with the exchange.  For yes....indeed, my Granny Clampet patient and her brothers were going to have road-kill squirrel for Christmas Eve dinner.   

I saw her again the day after Christmas and happened to remember to ask her how the squirrel and dumplins were....she acknowledged that it was “purty good.”   I asked her if there were any left-overs and she looked at me like I had sprouted 3 heads and slowly responded, ‘Nah.  Ain’t much eatin’ on a squirrel.  They’re real small-like.”   

Lesson Learned.