People As Projects

A few weeks back I was in Las Vegas for my sister’s surgery, and I decided to spend the night in ICU with her. There were two reasons I felt led to do so. The first was that I wanted Carol to know I cared enough to be at her side as she recovered. The second was that her youngest daughter, who is also her caregiver, was totally exhausted and needed a break.

I was warned by the night nurse that I could not fall asleep in ICU and stay with Carol. They did not allow that. In fact, she had removed any kind of comfortable chair. I appealed to the head nurse and she decided to favor me with an exception. But she also warned me I would have to make do with whatever was available in the room if I decided to fall asleep. And what was available was a hard metal stool and a hard metal chair. That was it.

I don’t think the night nurse, who initially told me I couldn’t sleep there, was very happy with me after the head nurse gave me permission. But I realized later the night nurse was not much of a people person. She was very much a rule-keeper and a bit unbending at that.

As the night wore on, she efficiently administered Carol’s meds according to how Carol was doing and what she said she needed. Most of the night Carol’s blood pressure was running high, as was her heart rate, and they had to give her additional meds to try to bring the numbers down. It wasn’t until their third try that there was some success, and the blood pressure began to stabilize.

But the single revealing moment was how this nurse changed the bedding for my sister before she went off-shift. She rolled and positioned Carol from one side to the other as needed, as if Carol was some sort of malleable object and not a human being. She mostly ignored Carol’s brief grunts of discomfort and pain. In similar fashion she washed Carol, briskly, thoroughly, as some people do their pots and pans. In the middle of what was obviously a chore to her, I asked if she could slow down a little and be gentler. She responded that she was being as gentle as she could, and she was just doing her job.

I have encountered this kind of attitude before and, of course, the movie Patch Adams was all about confronting that kind of attitude in the medical practice. People become procedures and diagnoses, like people in the prison system become numbers and the crimes they committed. We lose track of their humanity that way. It’s efficient but dehumanizing at the same time. The Nazis understood that very well.

How does a person get to that place? I am reminded—and convicted at the same time—it begins with how we choose to treat one another in various situations. Do we actually see the people, or do we see people as objects to be handled, controlled, and manipulated; obstacles toward our personal convenience or goal in life, or something entirely less than human?

When we lose sight of each other’s humanity, whether in a sudden moment of road-rage or a lifetime of believing that a certain people are not fit to walk the planet, we not only do tremendous disservice to those people—but ultimately to ourselves and to the God who created us both.

-Sally Klein O'Connor

10/30/23