Better
“Good morning Mr. Evans” Becky purred.
His face lit up and he sat up in bed. “Good morning Nurse Becky!” He eyed her up and down and all over. “Are you my nurse today?”
She smiled and bent over to bring her face closer to his, unintentionally also giving him an excellent view of her cleavage. “All week long.”
His growing hard-on pushed up the bed sheet prominently. “How many other rooms are you covering?”
“Well, we’re down to just 8 of you at the moment, so I’ve got you and Ms. Mok next door in Room 7. You’ll be seeing and hearing a lot of me.”
He smiled and knocked his knuckles together happily, to her surprise.
“OK if I take my break in here, Mr. Evans?”
“Sure!”
She pulled up a visitor’s chair next to his bed, next to him.
“To what do I owe this great new honor?” he asked.
He may be very ill, but the man sure still could flirt! A flit of blush swept through her then away. “I like to get to know my patients better. So much of the time we’re all rushing around, barely saying hello before we jab and poke and prod you and make you turn every which way so we can change the sheets. So I guess you could call it public relations. And that you seem like an interesting fellow.”
Their break-time conversation extended into resumption of work: they kept on chatting as she changed the bedding, emptied the urine bottle, and helped him with the bedpan. Things grew a little awkward as she helped him change his gown: at one point the process exposed his raging hard-on. She blushed but pretended not to notice. He felt embarrassed and did not bring it up.
Outside of this moment of awkwardness and a couple of visits next door to Room 7, the conversation kept flowing.
“I’ll be happy to tell you all about it, but I’m scheduled for lunch now.”
“Can you have it in here?”
“I can, but won’t the food smells bother you?”
“Not any more than usual when they waft in from outside. Your talking with me might help keep my mind off of my inability to eat food and how soon I’m going to die.”
“In that case, I’ll be right back.”
They conversed through lunch, into the afternoon, through her afternoon break, and all the way until her shift ended, other than a cumulative half hour in chunks of a few minutes here and there when she took care of Ms. Mok.
They hit it off quite well. Both were sad once the day shift ended. She inquired into doing a double shift, but she’d worked too many hours in the pay period to allow it.
“Gotta go, Mr. Evans.”
He grabbed her hand with surprising strength. “Promise me you’ll come back tomorrow?”
“I promise. See you tomorrow at 8 AM! Be nice to Nurse Jenny!”
“I will. Goodnight Nurse Becky.”
The remainder of the week went pretty much the same way: she spent nearly as much time as possible with him in his room, without neglecting her other patient or on a few days, patients, nor other duties in terms of documentation and the like.
They kept talking and talking… learning about each other, sharing their lives. He learned amongst many other things that she grew up in Solvang, California (a second-generation native Californian) and that it was an actual Danish settlement and not a fabricated tourist trap. Of the many things about him she learned, what stood out in her mind the most was his imaginative nature, creativity, and freethinking.
The more they talked, the more they bonded. The more they bonded, the more they wanted to be together. Yet even with all they shared, so much remained unspoken—such as almost anything to do with romance, other than each briefly establishing that the other had no love in their life and had not had one for some time.
Dr. Jameson pulled Becky aside after the end-of-week review meeting. “I owe you an apology, Ms. Larsen. After months of Mr. Evans having been in General and now his two weeks here, nothing anyone did brought about ongoing improvement until we assigned you to his room all week this week.”
She smiled and dipped a shallow nod.
“Five-fold improvement in one week is nothing short of dramatic!” he enthused. “SNS is the only known explanation which fits the data. I never thought a patient’s thoughts and feelings regarding those serving him could have this high degree of efficacy. Thank you for standing your ground and making me see the light and reconsider.”
“You’re welcome, Dr. Jameson. Thank you for acknowledging me. Whatever others may think of the purpose and goals of Angel 20, I continue to believe that all of us are here to heal.”
He smiled and gave her a pat-on-the-back quick hug, imagining his grandfather looking down approvingly.