West Side Stories: Ray Kahn recalls working the ICU night shift

She waved a bony finger, fixed me with her beady eyes, and said, “Hey Lung Boy. Get over here!”

Twenty-five years ago, I’m a brand new graduate from Skyline Community College, as a respiratory therapist. It’s my first official shift, walking into the ICU at 7:30 at night. I am not a night person. I figure nighttime is for sleeping, romance, and getting up at three o’clock in the morning to get a drink of water. I’m good. But when you’re a new graduate, and you’re broke, and you’ve got student loans, and the landlord is pounding on your door to pay the rent, you are working the night shift.

Her name was Denise.

She stood about five-foot-five. She was wiry thin. She was the Big Cheese in that ICU. She would walk up to anyone, a doctor, I don’t care how many initials they might have after their name. I remember she grabbed this four-year resident by the collar, yanked him over to a patient’s bedside, and said, “You ever do that again, I’m going to put a Foley where it’s gonna hurt.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: A Foley is a type of catheter, so … ouch.]

Denise had no time for newbies like me. See, she’d been a nurse for 40 years. She’d been an Army nurse, and had seen things few of us can imagine, as she went with the U.S. Army in Korea, suffered through the cold and the frostbite. And as she said to me one dark, rainy night, in a moment of vulnerability, “Jay, I’ve seen more people die in two weeks than you are old.”

But she stayed with them. She called all her patients, when she was in the military, her “boys.” You see, she’d been an orphan. As she said it, because she’d grown up in Brooklyn, in the view of Ebbets Field. Her mom had actually played in the Womens’ League during World War II.

So her mom was on the road, a single mom, with Denise at home.

The only thing that we bonded over was baseball.

I remember, I walked in one night, and I said, “Hey Denise. Do you know how well the Giants are doing?” And she said, “You know the Giants are lousy! They suck! And I’ve never liked them!”

“What are you talking about?”

You see, Ebbets Field is where the Dodgers originally came from, so she hated the Giants. So needless to say, I slowly took off my Giants hat.

“Yeah, they’re an awful team, and I don’t why they play in that terrible cement bowl called Candlestick.”

She had a wicked sense of humor.

But in the ICU, there are times when that is the only thing that gets you through. We had this one guy come in, and as you may know, some men are very proud of their … “equipment.” His last name was Mackintosh, and apparently, in a drunken stupor, he had “Big Mac” tattooed in a place that for some men is rather sensitive.

And in his delirium, he threw off his sheets, and Denise, who happened to be walking by, said, “You know, that’s not a Big Mac. That’s a Chicken McNugget.”

The thing that I learned from Denise, is how precious life really is. We had this one woman come in. And if there’s one thing Denise hated, it was the arrogance of those who thought they were in charge. This woman apparently had multiple physicians, and she kept getting passed from one to the other. Unfortunately, she’d had a massive stroke, and as she lay dying in the hospital bed, her husband came in. He was a veteran of WWII. Apparently, they’d met at Pearl Harbor, and had become sweethearts and married. Her hands were swelling, and one of the nurses said, ‘Hey, why don’t we just cut her wedding ring off? What’s the big deal?”

But Denise said, “No, that’s not right.”

She spent the next two hours, working it, working it, working it, working it, and finally Denise got this woman’s wedding ring off, and gave it to the husband. And you saw this old marine, who limped, who still had a flattop haircut, just melt into this old Army nurse’s arms as if she was just a soft place to fall.

I lost track of what happened to Denise.

And then one day, there was a call overhead, “Code Blue, Room 423 Floor West.” I go rushing into the room, and I started doing what I’m supposed to do as a respiratory therapist – chest compressions, oxygen – and then I look down, and it’s her.

And all of a sudden, in the midst of this commotion, it was like I just sort of drifted out, and I saw somebody with this bony finger, from the other side, going, “Hey, Lung Boy. Remember what I told you, how precious life is? Why don’t you tell them to let me go? ‘Cause I’ve had my time. You know where I want to be. In a field in Iowa, playing catch with my mom.”

And then all of a sudden I was back, and the doctor said, “Well, I don’t know what we should do here. What do you think, Jay?”

And I said, “Why don’t we let her go? Because she’s been at this for forty years, and it’s her time.”

So, from the moment I first walked into that ICU, to the last time, Denise was the Big Cheese, the one in charge. And she taught me that lesson, that this moment, the last moment, is the most precious moment.

Thank you.