Well - Tara Parker-Pope on Health
February 23, 2011, 1:28 pm
Feeding the Nurses
By THERESA BROWN, R.N.
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

I joke that nurses will do anything for food. Good food, bad food, healthy food, junk food — we’re not particular. Patients must understand that too, because they constantly bring us food.
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times Theresa Brown, R.N.

Usually the gifts are some kind of dessert: cookies, chocolates, candies. The variety makes it interesting. Godiva chocolates, Russell Stovers, chocolate-covered pretzels, homemade chocolate chip cookies, cookies from the Panera down the street, bakery cookies with big smiley faces made of icing. Someone once brought in almond nougat from the family’s store. A Hershey’s kiss can be exactly what I need to make the day feel better, especially since lunchtime has long passed and I haven’t had time to eat.

The truth is, though, I try to eat sparingly because I learned early in the job that stress eating is an occupational hazard. Having our conference room filled with doughnuts and caramel corn makes it all too easy to, as we say, “eat my feelings,” rather than just feeling them.

So I try to focus on my own feelings — but I think, too, about the feelings expressed in those very welcome gifts of food.

Overwhelmingly, the feeling is thanks. Sometimes a plate of cookies will come with a note, “Thanks for taking such good care of my mother.” Other times, the food will have a Post-it note hurriedly scribbled with “from” and the patient’s room number.

The food tends to be store-bought, not homemade. Patients’ families are busy, after all, traveling to and from the hospital, trying to hold onto jobs, getting their children to school, making sure the bills get paid, dealing with the seriousness of cancer.

I remember one remarkable lunch provided by a patient’s family. The patient, a young woman, had died about a month before. Her mother arranged a catered lunch for the nurses on the floor. There were two different kinds of pasta dishes, a dressed salad and bread. The food came in big aluminum pans — enough for day shift, with plenty left over for night turn as well.

The patient’s mother had set up the lunch with our charge nurse, but then could not bring herself to come up to the floor to personally deliver it. She thought she would be O.K., but then she wasn’t. So the food came up without her. It was really good food, but more than its quality, the feelings expressed by the food were what made it memorable.

The patient who had died was young, beautiful and very, very sweet. It was impossible to have known her, to have been her nurse, and not feel sadness and frustration at how very badly her treatment course had gone.

She was African-American and awaiting a stem cell transplant, but finding matches can be particularly difficult for black Americans, who are less likely than whites to join stem cell registries and whose genetically diverse ancestry makes matching more difficult. Her disease was aggressive, she never did get a donor and she left this world much too soon.

No wonder, then, that her mother could not bear to return to the hospital floor. But she sent that amazing lunch, to thank us, but also, I think, to reconnect with the community of people most able to understand her particular pain.

And that’s probably why most people give us food. The thanks they feel is deep. They are of course thanking us for doing our jobs — doling out pills, conferring with doctors, drawing labs. But it’s the emotional work we do that really inspires people’s gratitude.

One day a healthy-looking woman showed up on the floor with the most amazing chocolate cake. She brought us the cake because it was her birthday — not her biological birthday, but the anniversary of the day she got her stem cell transplant.

I had never seen her before. It turned out she had received her transplant before I came on the floor and was one of our success stories. This patient had done so well post-transplant that she never needed to be hospitalized. She also had time to bake for us, and the cake was divine.

She happily shared the recipe with me, but I have deliberately never made the cake. Although I’m quite a good baker, I feel certain there’s no way I could ever make the cake taste as delicious as it did that day. Out of context it would simply be a chocolate cake. It would lack the inspiring story, the rare and priceless vision of a patient to whom we gave a brand-new life.