Just Another Night On-call

Ice storms are no deterrent to an on-call hospice nurse, and I did the half-hour drive into town in 20 minutes flat. The telltale porch light identified the only house where anyone was expected at this time of night. The elderly woman had died before the family called, so I was here to comfort, tie up loose ends, and see to the body being picked up.

Their long, icy sidewalk sloped up to the front door, so I put the handles of my bag over my shoulder and grabbed onto shrubs to pull myself up the slick sidewalk.

Hadn’t been to this house before and had never met this particular family, but I’d done this for a while and was pretty unflappable. I’d faced crying families, laughing families, and a son with a gun who said, “You’d better not let my mama die.” I’d cared for people in mansions, in the basement of a fast food drive-through, and in creepy motel rooms. Sometimes people called when they were profusely bleeding and sometimes when they were profoundly lonely, both emergencies in hospice world. If you want to do this kind of work, you’d better wear your mental tap shoes and be ready for anything, especially when you’re out there alone on call in the middle of the night.

A middle-aged gentleman opened the door. His wife and two small children looked on from the dining room.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Nothin’ we didn’t expect,” he answered, his tone ending the conversation like a guillotine. “She’s upstairs.” He nodded toward the stairway in the corner of the rather che’che’ living room. It was clear I was going up alone.

The thing is, this wasn’t just any stairway. It was one of those self-contained steel columnar jobs, tall and narrow with triangular steps that wound around and around and finally delivered one into the upstairs hallway through a hole in the ceiling. I popped out into the upstairs hall like whack-a-mole, hospice edition.

Grandma was, indeed, dead. She was a round woman, short and full-figured, and she rested under a lovely homemade quilt. I called the funeral home so they’d be on their way, did what had to be done, then picked my way back down the stairwell to the living room. The family declined my offer to spend time with grandma before the funeral home folks arrived, so we waited silently.

Finally, the doorbell rang, and I greeted the man from the funeral home, but it wasn’t the usual guy.

“Omigod, the ice,” he said. He was a skinny needle of a man, red faced and twitching nervously. I guessed he wasn’t used to making middle of the night runs for bodies, that he likely worked in some other capacity, likely a desk job. I poked my head out the door, looking for someone else. Usually they send two guys. 

“Had to come alone,” he said. “Busy night.” My back started to throb at the thought of just the two of us carrying Grandma. We stepped inside, and he took off his black topcoat. Now what do you suppose he had in his coat that would make the situation even more fun? He had one arm. Not one arm and then the other arm. Just one arm. So, I’ve got an inexperienced skinny guy with one arm who’s mouth breathing after coming up the walk from the street.

“Where’s the gurney?” I ask.

“Right here,” he says. I hadn’t even noticed the skinny poles he was holding. Turns out, he’d brought the kind of stretcher made of two poles with a piece of canvas in between. I hadn’t seen one of those since my brother was a Cub Scout and had to practice rescuing our pissed off dog from the woods.

I pointed at the staircase and led the way. Once upstairs, I peered back down at Don Knots trying to get those two long poles up the circular staircase. He banged them on every rung, hit himself on the forehead a couple of times, and finally got everything dead sideways, so I had to go down and help dislodge him. We walked down the hall to the bedroom.

“Oh, my,” he said when he saw Grandma. We rolled her to the side of the bed, and I held her there while the emaciated one unfurled his canvas and laid it on the sheet. I gently rolled her back, and the canvas disappeared beneath her. Don’t know what kind of wood those skinny little poles were made of, but I surely hoped they were going to support this woman all the way to the funeral home station wagon without incident. We covered her with a sheet, fastened two wide straps to hold her to the stretcher and then took our positions on each side of the bed. I grabbed my pole tightly with both hands.

“One, two three,” I said and we lifted. Nothing happened.

“One, two, three,” I repeated. And, we achieved lift-off, just enough to clear the edge of the bed. We inched our way out of the room, then down the hall. Funeral man is beet red, grandma is pure white, and I’m looking at the circular staircase before us.

I hoisted my end of the stretcher onto my right shoulder, holding it there with one hand, freeing up the other one to hold tightly to the rail. I took one step down. This put Grandma at about 10 degrees off horizontal. I moved down another step. 20 degrees off horizontal. Third step-you get the ratio. Now it was funeral man’s turn to take his first step down. He hoisted the stretcher onto his shoulder and held it there, having to lean his hip against the rail for support.

We proceeded downward, my knees shaking, buckling under the full weight of Grandma, the stretcher, and for all I knew, funeral man, all balanced on my shoulder. Now, there was absolutely no reason at all to think that these poles would go down any easier than they went up. We got snagged on every little wrought iron detail. Halfway down, our load was now vertical. Grandma was virtually standing above the living room, something none of us had anticipated at this stage of her life.

And then I began to wonder. How well had we fastened those straps? My mind conjured  up those old movie scenes when a sailor died mid-journey and they carried him to the rail on a plank under a blanket to give him a burial at sea. I envisioned Grandma shooting out into the living room and landing right at the feet her family.

It had been a strange evening, all right, skirting chaos and mayhem, but we made it downstairs without traumatizing the children and moved toward the front door. I began to think about that warm, soft bed waiting for me at home. As we stepped onto the front porch, covered with it’s thick layer of glare ice, the three of us began moving down the sidewalk toward the black station wagon parked out on the street. But, by moving, I do not mean walking. No, we were sliding downhill--me, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Grandma––picking up speed as we went, racing toward the curb like a 3-man luge team from hell while the family watched from the doorway. We hit the side of the car, and funeral man went flat on his back behind me. Next came Grandma on the stretcher falling right on top of him. Then I, the third domino, also fell backward onto Grandma because the stretcher had smacked me in both Achilles tendons. There we were, a human triple-decker sandwich, halfway under the funeral home car, half out in the elements looking up at the falling snow. but at least we’d stopped. And, the snow was pretty. Eventually, Grandma was tucked safely inside the car, funeral guy got behind the wheel of what I sincerely hoped was his automatic transmission car and waved.

“Thanks for coming,” I said.

While driving home, I dialed the report line to let the day shift know how the night had gone.

“Mornin’, guys. Mrs. Leopold died at 2:00 am. Otherwise, a pretty quiet night.”