Chapter 4: Workplace

“Pay attention, Yuan! We have a busy day today!” Yuan quickly snaps out of her daze, and rubs her eyes. Lin, the head nurse of the Oncology department, shook her head and quickly resumed her summaries in the nurses’ meeting. Yuan never liked the nurses’ meeting. Lin would always start off by asking one of the night shift nurses to report any entering patients, patients ready to leave, and patients that have passed away. Yuan has become desensitized to death. Being in the Oncology department, she’s seen many patients, most of which were elderly folk in their 70s or 80s, pass away because they came to the hospital with a late stage, untreatable cancer. Their stay in the ward was never really extended; Yuan never really became attached to any of them. After all, most of the caretaking was done by family members that stayed with the patient. In fact, Yuan started viewing the patients as simply bed occupants and having a patient either pass away or leave the hospital just meant another patient waiting could come in and occupy the newly opened bed.

After the initial reports are made and all patients and beds are all accounted for, Lin then proceeds to reading through particular patient charts that have been giving the nurses and doctors problems. Yuan pulls out her notebook and writes down a few notes on the beds that she has been assigned, and walks out of the office into the wards. It looks like a tattered battleground, the wards; the off-white colored walls dirtied from the scuffling of makeshift bed frames against them. The rooms, aching for renovation, fit anywhere between 4 beds to 6 beds, with a small shared bathroom next to an outside patio. Although the attending physicians keep the same room assignments, the nurses rotate through the different rooms, further distancing the nurses from the patients. Yuan looked down at her notebook where she scribbled down which rooms she had today. “Rooms 1, 3 and 5”—she was lucky, each of these rooms only had 4 patients.