Student Nurse has Super Powers

I cared for a frail 90-something Chinese man this week whose wife was in her 40's. She lovingly held his hand, fed him spoonfuls of applesauce and wiped the drool from his chin.

She had lived most of her life in China, and she derived great pride and esteem from her family for the care she rendered to her geriatric husband.

For reasons no one understood, the man slipped into unconsciousness early in the morning.

The woman wept quietly at the bedside, her shiny raven locks buried in the soft blankets and his withered thighs.

The man had been strong and fertile in his younger years. People gathered, and every time I walked towards the room I heard several concerned family members speaking in hushed Cantonese. Concern and heartache clenched their shoulders and lined their brows.

At dinnertime the man woke up as unexpectedly as he as slipped away, and said in his native tongue, "What are you all doing here?"

The wife yelped and clutched him and scolded him for scaring them, and a small celebration began.

She gifted the nurses with candied nuts, gushing our virtues in broken English.

When I walked in the room she said, "He awake! You so good nursie, now he awake! You give me you name, I write it down, I tell people now he awake!"

I think she was attributing his surprising recovery to my work as his Student Nurse, but frankly I did nothing but palliative care for this man.

She believed that I had some power over sickness and death in our completely random universe, and this helped her feel more secure in this end-of-life situation.

Does our profession perpetuate this myth? How?