Transport and the Zipper Lady Nancy Palker
From the memoir Tragic and Magic Rosebud, a Lost Lake Folk Art new release scheduled for 2019.
Bravery. Woohitike (wo-oh-hee-tee-keh). Having or showing courage. e called her the Zipper Lady. The nurse from St. Anthony’s Flying Service reminded us of the “Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse” book we had read as young girls. In her 30s, with brown hair pulled back oh so neatly, she wore a blue jumpsuit with a zillion zippers for all her snazzy high-tech equipment and doodads. Larger than life, a superhero to us, she carried on efficiently as she prepared the sickest patients to be airlifted to a proper From a photo by Nance Palker medical center in Rapid City, South Dakota, Lincoln, Nebraska, or sometimes Denver, Colorado. We Rosebud staff members would gather with our noses pressed against the nursery window, enthralled as she deftly whisked a baby off to the waiting plane. The only surprise was that it didn’t happen more often, as we were pitifully understaffed, undertrained, and undersupplied. The Zipper Lady’s appearance always seemed to save the day. We did our best with what we had, but like the rest of the reservation, our resources were meager at best. As a newly budding nurse, I had decided that I would never do something to a patient that I hadn’t experienced myself. Shortly after I had devised that great idea, I received a doctor’s order to pass an NG tube, which was about 1/4” diameter going up one’s nose, down the throat and into the stomach. I understood why that patient needed this procedure and I did not, and thus ended that naive resolution. Another principle we’d learned in nursing school was to use “nursing measures” before giving sleep medication, if possible, to avoid unwanted side effects of the meds. Sometimes repositioning or adjusting the pillow could solve the problem, though we discovered that it worked more often in books than in practice. Often a combination of nursing and meds worked best. About ten o’clock one night, the man at the end of the hall asked for a sleeping pill. Following the nursing theory, I had learned in school, I first went to his room without the pill, and offered him a backrub to relax him, which was then standard practice on the evening shift. He gladly accepted the backrub, but moments after I started, I felt his hands rubbing MY backside, so I quickly got him his chloral hydrate pill to knock him out for the night, standing at an arm’s length away to hand it to him with a glass of water. After that, he got all of his meds regularly from me, administered from a distance, minus the backrubs.
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92 Summer 2018
