Vietnamese Maria

I woke up in excuciating pain. On a scale of 1-10 it was a 15. I look up and a Vietnamese woman is looking down at me. She grabs my hand and asks me to describe my pain. I tell her my back is on fire. She tells me to hold on and immediately there is a doctor in a scrub cap looking down at me. They speak about what to do and the Vietnamese nurse walks away and is back almost immediately. I struggle to read her name tag. She smiles and says, "hi, I'm your nurse, Annie." She is hooking up something I recognize immediately--a PCA pump (Patient Controlled Analgesia--a pump to administer IV pain medication at a constant rate and the patient can also hit a button for a extra kick during allowed time limits). Her hands are flying as I am crying. She looks at me and says, "Who is John?" At this point I don't recall talking--just crying. I said, "Why?". She said you kept crying and saying, "Where's John, I need John." I closed my eyes and said, "My husband. I am in the process of a divorce. An ugly one." I point at the pump and ask hopefully, "Morphine?", she smiles and says, "No, even better--Dilaudid." (10X stronger with less side effects). She told me she heard I was a nurse (an anesthesiologist I used to work with was the one that put me to sleep.) I was getting ready to open my mouth to thank her and I blacked out. I woke up in my hospital room and it was dark. Sulie and one of my friends came in. I was out right away. The next morning I woke up to find Dillhole sitting in the chair next to my bed. I had the surgery 5 months after moving back to Tampa. He was worried about me. I looked at him and remembered him carrying me up 3 flights of stairs to my apartment 10 years prior when I was sick. That was back in my size 6, 125 lbs. days. The days leading up to my back surgery he would come over to the condo I was living in and rub my back while I laid on the sofa crying. We would eat Chipotle and watch movies. He told me I was no longer the happy, laughing girl he once knew. I told him she was gone. He told me she was just hibernating.  He reasoned if I could get over him (meaning him--Dillhole) that I could get over John. Back to the hospital--I just stared at him thinking, "Wow, Dillhole is here to check on me" (he has been called Dillhole for so many years by my sister that I truly think of his as Dillhole). He asked how I felt--I remember saying, "ok" and then I started to fall asleep. I felt him kiss my on the forehead and heard him walk away.

I flashed back to this memory of April, 2008 today. In my job I call on surgeons and operating room  nurses. I was in an O.R. today I had to cut through the recovery room. I saw an Asian nurse and I smiled as I remembered Annie my Vietnamese nurse. I was so gorked that night, but I remembered her name. I called St Joe's the next week and asked for the recovery room. I described her and said all I knew was Annie and she was Asian. The woman on the phone said, yes, she's Vietnamese, so am I." I asked for Annie's last name. I wrote her a thank you note. I told her how I knew how tough it is to get an order, find a pump, get the drug from the narc drawer and hang it. She did it all in record time. It makes me think that God had a sense of humor when I was sent a Vietnamese Maria. I don't think I got that until today when I had my recovery room memory.