We Live Where We Are

The Shower Nurse

At the hospital I noticed this woman walking around in shorts and a t-shirt. She was quite smiley and usually pushing this one older lady around in a wheel chair. For a week I thought she was a patient's daughter, and so I was very surprised when she showed up in my room with a wheel chair one evening. She made enthusiastic motions to get in it, and being unable to ask in Japanese where she was taking me, I clumsily obliged, assuming she wanted to take me to meet her mother. I thought this was really wierd, but failed to find another reason why she would want to wheel me around the hospital and figured this was another enigma of the Japanese culture. These days, in the spirit of living in a foreign country, my new mantra is to just roll with it.

However, I reached my breaking point when she wheeled me into a room with an 11 foot square bath tub and a shower nozzle. By this point I was desperately hoping she was a hospital employee (I wish I could attribute the fact that I still hadn't caught on yet to a cocktail of powerful pain medication that rendered me a faulknerian idiot- but I can't because the only thing they had me on was a very small dose of tylenol, yet another thing that made little sense) I had bathed myself just fine the days before, and generally the nurses would leave me to undress in privacy to do so. However this woman refused. She pantomined pulling off her shorts with great flourish and I responded by slowly taking off my glasses and robe hoping she would leave like the others by the time I finished. This only made her impatient. She started to pull up her shirt a la Girls Gone Wild before stopping midway, then tugging aggressively on mine while speaking in rapid Japanese. So I shyly took off my shirt and stood on my good leg. My back was to her and she seized the opportunity to yank down my pants, underwear and all. I was literally pantsed. I quickly hopped onto a plastic lawn chair and she proceeded to bathe me before a brisk and militant toweling off. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I could have really used her help the days following my surgery. But this was now 10 days later, and I was more than capable of washing myself.

I learned later she is what is called "a shower nurse."

[Note: An actual post by the lovely Julianna? Well bless my nippers. - Casey]