Squeamish Need Not Apply

If nothing else, I should definitely learn wound care in this job. My last week has included:

- Almost more leg and foot ulcers (pressure sores and stasis ulcers) than I can count. They look, and apparently are, incredibly painful. One particularly Eeyore-esque patient really was strenuously fishing for us to tell her that yes, her pain was worse than anyone else's. We pretended not to notice the heavy hints, but agreed in the elevator as we were leaving that although it's impossible to compare any person's pain to any other's, we could assure her that she won the prize for amount of complaining. By the way, the secret to a tolerable dressing change seems to be a dab of lidocaine gel on a square of gauze, stuck to the wound for about 10 minutes before you start to irrigate it or otherwise mess with it.

- A very mild-mannered and unexceptional-looking silver-haired gentleman with a 4 x 4 square of gauze taped to his face under the left side of his glasses. When the gauze is removed, it reveals a dramatically gaping socket that almost looks like a Halloween-ish exaggeration. The job of the nurse is to take a flashlight and look carefully at the tissue to make sure there's no infection, then clean it out by squirting in sterile saline, whereupon the mild-mannered gentleman sloshes his head side to side several times to get it in all the nooks and crannies, and then expels the fluid out of his nose and into a basin.

- A nice older lady with an incredibly doting and supportive family and a nasty-ass surgical belly wound that's having some healing issues. Wounds that don't heal sometimes get "tunneling" or "undermining," which is where the tissue under the skin kind of gets eroded, and you can get pretty extensive cave-like areas beyond the edges of the original wound. Her daughter Nancy is particularly loving, and also notably earthy and irreverent. When she first saw the extent of her mother's wound, she told her, "jeez, Mom, you could keep your cell phone in there!"