Strength and Weakness in one little Package.

 

Subject: Strength and Weakness in one little Package.

Remeber I wrote about Josephine a while ago?  Well, Josephine wailed
again all night.   The most frustrating thing is that her pain is
coming from her mind.    Her foot has got to hurt her (after all,
it's infected down to the bone), but her mind is just amplifying her
pain.   She has a little tube of ketamine for her dressing changes
and she had another ampule of diazapam for these nights when she
screams and yells and keeps everyone in the hospital awake.   But the
ampule was empty and she was crying.  It was 1 am and I hadn't slept
because there was one urinary surgery patient whose catheter kept
getting blocked up with clots and I had to watch it's flow closely or
his bladder would swell and he would have awful pain.  I peaked
around the corner to see that Josephine was not trying to climb out
of her bed (she has done this numerous times) in an attempt to go
home.   What I saw was strength in a child and weakness in a child
all at once.   Josephine reached down to the floor in the midst of
all her crying and started tapping her 7 year old daughter who slept
on the cement floor.   She tapped her until the little girl sat
up.  She was so tired.  The said something in Nangjere that obviously
meant, "Come up on the bed with me," or "Come, be miserable with me,"
I'm not sure which.  But the little girl followed orders and climbed
up on the bed.  Her mom grabbed her arms and wrapped them around her
while she continued in her mentally-disturbed expressions of
pain.  The little girl just didn't know what to do and her eyes were
wide.  I could tell she was just plain scared.   I went over and
pulled Josephine's grip off her little girl and told her little girl
to get down and go back to sleep.   She layed back down on her cement
mattress.  Josephine just was out of it.  Mental disease is no one's
fault.  But the strength of this little girl was that she could be
the strong one.   When I came to help her off the bed, I could see
tears in her eyes, but none of them were falling.   She was strong
for her mom.   The weakness was that she was helpless to be in any
other situation than this.   Everyday she helps prepare the food for
her mom, she looks after the baby, and she brings her mom water for
all her meds.   This girl is so strong, but not strong enough to
break of this situation.   I wish her mom's leg would get better and
that she could leave this hospital.   The situation just is growing
her up too fast.