She sat there, rage eating chocolate ice cream. Every bite she took hurt me to watch, and there was nothing I could do. It was emotional knives. She loved chocolate ice cream. The nurse thought she was being clever.
This wasn’t clever. This was cruel. This was awful and painful. Mom’s mouth sores were really bad, so the other nurses had been letting her take the medicine by giving it to her to add to small bits of ice cream. Soft....cool...comforting.
A solution. This nurse was new and didn’t give a fuck about these patients on the terminal ward. She mixed it into a whole serving of ice cream.
Mom’s medication also made her nauseous.
Tonight she was forced to eat the whole thing because the nurse thought she’d get calories in her with this shitty, mean trick.
One of her favorite foods.... and now, in this harshly lit place of indignity, it was now poison. Mom was livid. I was livid and heartbroken. Filled with righteous rage and helpless to do anything but sit there with her, willing her to keep every bite down. Dad was pale and hating feeling so powerless in this whole rotten deal, and trying to talk her into a lighter mood, as she fought the nausea to get her life back. His ballerina...feverish, too thin, and shaking with anger as she ate
too much fucking ice cream.
Ice cream should be a celebration.... When the ordeal was done and she was resting more comfortably, I quietly bee lined to the nurse’s station and had a whispered shouting lecture with the woman on duty.
I made sure that new nurse never set foot in our room again.
June 2018
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