awkard moments

You know those awkward moments when someone sees you, they wave emphatically, smile, and grin at you like you are their long lost best friend.  And if they aren’t driving past you in traffic, or across the way at the check-out themselves, they rush to greet you, shake your hand vigorously, and pull you into an embrace….And the entire time, you cannot remember for the life of you, who they are…so you muster a smile of your own, while in your head you are rapidly flipping through “old files” attempting to find “the file” with their information on it- so you too can be as excited as they are.

I have been experiencing a number of those awkward moments lately. Just the other day a precious patient found me in the hospital hallway. She smiled at me from ear to ear, pulled my hand from my pocket, grasped it tightly in hers, and ran her little chocolate tinted fingers over my vanilla forearm, all while looking intently into my eyes as if I was her closest friend.  I quickly glanced at her, trying to see where her bandage was to cue me into what operation she had had, but there were no bandages in sight. Every so slightly embarrassed at the awkwardness of the situation, I just kept holding the little one’s hand. However, she kept looking at me so enthusiastically, I knew I had to know her for some reason, so I humbled myself and asked her in French, “what did we do for you?” She looked at me with a blank stare on her face for a few seconds, then pointed to her elbow.

There upon the back of her elbow was a 6 inch incision that was open to air and healing well, I could barely tell that she had had any surgery….And then I remembered…I regained all recollection of her situation … I couldn’t believe it! I did a double take! She was the little girl I had spent hours with during her triage phase. She had come and gone, seeing many doctors, for assessment upon assessment. I had her return for appointments, in hopes that our CT scanner would be fixed, just to learn it hadn’t yet been fixed and we had to push back her appointments again… and again.   

Where there had once been a large, firm, grapefruit sized tumor protruding off the back of her skinny, little, elbow and a cantaloupe sized mass on her little hip, there were only healing incision lines.  The timid little girl who months ago would barely look at me, the nurse, with vanilla tinted skin, had disappeared.  She had transformed into the confident, bright-eyed beauty, who held my hand.  She grasped my hand tightly for a few more minutes, and then skipped off down the hall-way and back into the plastic surgery ward. I walked away to triage more patients and as walked, I thanked God for the transformed little girl and for the “awkward moment.”