Malevolent Queen

You know, for most patients, I'll sit here and remember their names. With him, I don't want to remember. I guess I've repressed it, fearing that the utterance might draw his wrath from where I last "felt" him, for lack of a better term.

He called himself an "old queen." For years, he waited for some tolerance for his lifestyle, and never received it. It left him bitter and highly manipulative. That's how he got his joy. He wandered up and down the hall, head held high and shoulders set square, in a paisley silk bathrobe and matching worn slippers. He was a Public Aid patient, which he hated. As a previous clothing purchase for a major upscale department store, it wasn't the dignity he expected for his older years, and his meager Public Aid stipend gave him little happiness. At the end of the hall, last room on the left, I first met him under the austere commissioned portrait of his mother, triple her actual size, a dominating piece in any home, much more so in the small confines of his half of a nursing home room. Average height, average weight, thin ankles, well-kept nails, and nearly bald, but completely elegant until I spoke his name.

He took one look at me and said, "Oh, you are new. I refuse." He waved me off with a graceful flick at the wrist.

I countered with, "Sir, I need to check your blood sugars. How can I administer your insulin dose if you don't let me check your sugar levels?"

"I refuse that too. You young nurses think you know everything. Well, you don't, and I have sensitive fingers. Get Bonnie."

"I'm not sure Bonnie's here today."

"Find her. She's the best stick. If she's not here, I refuse."

And that's how we began our nurse/patient relationship. It turned out Bonnie, who wasn't there that day, had been the "stick" of choice the week before, but the two days before that, it was Sharon, and the day before that, Tiffany. You see, he'd pick favorites for a period of time. I was his on-and-off favorite (as were many of us) for a year. Sometimes, I'd prick his finger and he'd howl, and he'd refuse my services for the next couple of days. When he relented, I pricked his finger in exactly the same fashion as previous, and I was back to being the best stick in the home. The injections were the same way. Some days, he wanted one of us to do the pricking of the finger for a glucose reading, but we "screwed up" the shot the time before, so the other nurse needed to go find someone else to do the actual insulin injection. I never got angry, and most of the other nurses never did, either. A patient is handled on a case-by-case basis, and he knew it, and he used it to stir up as much trouble as possible.

I say this because I worked mostly the night shift. As I charted, sometimes, he sat next to me and we chatted like two rational people. I've mentioned my accent before. See, people speak uniquely. Just as he called himself "old queen", I said often that I had hopes that the "night shift" (hear with southern accent) allowed me to catch up on charting things, changing O₂ tanks, replacing tube feeding bags, fixing pumps, checking nebulizers, double-checking pharmacy orders, and so on, or I hoped for a "quiet night" (hear again the southern accent) if we were short on help. Night shifts gets really, really rocky at times, at its worst when a couple of people can't make it in for work. Right after I started work there, he mimicked my accent and we both got a laugh out of it; the next day, he proceeded to tell so and so that, on the "night shift", using my accent, I said that I wished I had a "quiet night" (again, my accent) and added that I blamed the previous shifts for leaving me with so much work. Of course, he said I named names, etc. When advised of this the next night during report, I was horrified. I was darn near tears, and then the swing shift nurse kind of smiled. "He does that to everybody. Nobody believes him any more, but he's very, very convincing."

I noted that the night before during our chat, where he'd discuss nursing home gossip and other things, always with his personal interjections that "I don't think what she did was right, but you should know..."

I mentioned he was Public Aid. That meant only a semiprivate room for him, where the first bed held a roommate, but never for long. He wanted the room all his. I once caught him at the end of the bed, agitating his poor roommate by calling him horrible names and telling him things that straight men (or any man, for that matter) don't want to hear about his intentions and persuasions. I don't think he would have carried out his threats; he wanted his room back and, for the patient's body and mind safety, we got him out of there. It didn't matter if the patient was comatose, either. I'd pass meds and be near his room, which he knew, and I'd hear the distinctive sound of a hand slapping flesh. I'd go in to see, and he pretended to sleep on his back with his hands behind his head, elbows out, legs crossed at the ankles, and with a very disgusting smile on his lips, so seemingly dead to the world he couldn't hear his name called.

In the end, he got his private room. Couldn't chance a roommate. We used Bed A solely as a transfer bed, somewhere to keep the patient in private while the new guy's own room arrangements were complete. The Old Queen tolerated that, although we heard an earful of complaints. As long as someone occupied his room, he did our duties with us, fussing the entire time.

His one living family member, his brother, visited frequently, a kind gentleman who often brought his wife, whom our ominous "he" adored. Apparently, he preferred the gentle wife to his own brother, but that seemed quite sweet to us. He tried to immortalize his mother by way of the painting and a few nice stories, so we just chalked it up to one of his many quirks, and one quite benign for a change.

His brother and his wife left for Florida. When they returned, the wife died shortly thereafter. He said she felt a lump in her stomach and his brother refused to return early from vacation in order to have it evaluated. In short, he blamed his brother for her death, and his quirks became more pronounced, going into outright, public displays of hostility to the other patients. He stalked up and down the hallways, citing their inability to form coherent sentences or their "pathetic" confinement to a wheelchair. He threw a Kleenex box at a stroke patient for a little dab of drool clinging to the corner of the nonfunctional side of her mouth.

Not surprisingly, he had a "spell." I'm not quite sure it was ever categorized as anything definitive, but he went to the hospital, where he had a subsequent run of debilitating health problems. He came back to us bedbound, incontinent, and more verbally vicious, refusing everything but his food. It didn't matter that he no longer squawked at us over our shoulders as we worked; he generated a large amount of volume, always so hateful and demeaning.

Social services intervened, and, eventually, he signed advanced directives, citing two stipulations:

1. He be buried with the picture of his mother.

2. All his possessions he would donate to the home, provided they left the pieces of masking tape with his name as owner on the belongings he donated. His clothes needed labeled as well.

Despite his grand hatred of us all, we thought the gesture kind and might be his way of apology. I wasn't there, so I can't chalk it up to myth or fact, but it was said that someone went to tell him his brother was on his way to visit, and he died just minutes later, right before his brother arrived.

He was buried with his mother, her portrait removed from its frame and rolled to lie parallel to him with his arm around it. His belongings, per his wishes, were distributed to other needy patients.

His electric shaver nicked a chunk of skin out of a gentleman's face, pulling its hair too far into the cutting chamber, I guess, and the day shift cleaned it and put it in the medication room to see if the maintenance guy could do something with it. The staff noticed changes in the patients near his old room. An eerie, inexplicable depression seemed to fall on every patient in the entire wing, mentally strong or feeble, and seemingly stable patients we put into that last room on the end of the hall grew restless or needed transfer to the hospital for sudden respiratory difficulties. A meek patient got angry and threw food at a neighbor, making a mess on himself at the same time.

Guess whose shirt he wore?

The aide brought the shirt up the hall and tossed it on the counter at the nursing station. "What the hell did we ever do to that poor old queen but put up with him?"

For a week, we cumulatively made notes of all the odd occurrences, immobile patients sliding out of their wheelchairs onto the floor, screaming fits from calm patients, or outright belligerence, foul language, and hitting behavior from our docile patients, all in the vicinity of the room on the end of the hall. We made notes on the extra pinches or swings patients took at the staff during normal care routines. I recall three patients biting staff before; two occurred the week after his funeral.

There was a profound change in our ornery patients, as well. The worst got even worse. Our resident evil, one who chanted prayers to Satan most of his waking hours, started throwing excrement at us rather than calling us "big-titted whores" and trying to grab a nipple for a horrible pinch.

Was something wrong? Really?

I received report from the swing shift nurse. She spoke of more eerie things, and several aides hanging around the station mentioned what we might need to do to get rid of him. They tossed the idea around about maybe a priest, one who could attend to our resident Satanist, as well. I wrote down notes on the other patients, just as an aide ran up the hall.

A few weeks before, we admitted a very lovely gentleman whose only real downfall was a very weak heart. His wife died, and his family wanted to make sure he had constant supervision. He was a private pay patient, and got the entire room.

The aide careened down the hall. "Hey! Hey! Mr. Smith is down! I can't get him up. Help!"

We followed her into the room, and she kneeled next to him.

"I think he's dead. Ain't been long, though."

Mr. Smith lay in a pile of sweat. I touched his forehead, which was feverish. I took a pulse and didn't find it. I took the maroon stethoscope from around my neck, and listened for a heartbeat, but it never came. The aide ran back in with a blood pressure cuff, threw it to me, and the other nurse rushed in with the code status.

"No code," the nurse said.

"No blood pressure," I said, and looked at the clock.

We split the final duties. The other nurse called the family and I helped the aide get Mr. Smith into the bed from the floor. Before moving him, though, I brushed the fine hair away from his forehead (he still had a beautiful head of black hair with a few white hairs here and there), and the oscillating pedestal fan in the corner blew the hair back to where it started.

Once in bed, the aide tended to him, and I patted Mr. Smith's feet. I don't know why; I've always done that. The last thing I do before I call the mortuary is twiddle the patient's toes. Maybe it's the gesture I can do, since a lifeless face looks so much like a wax figurine, and his? Mr. Smith looked like he had been scared to death.

As I turned, I saw the fan, and reached to turn it off. There, on a piece of masking tape, was his name. The fan helped the chills spread up my arms and down through my spine to my toes.

Call it whatever you want; after Mr. Smith died in that nice private room on another wing, far from The Old Queen's old room, things normalized. Was it a final act of malfeasance or our imagination? No one admitted to it, but the fan, which grew in legend, accidentally met the floor one day, cracking the casing. I can only imagine what happened to the clothes and the electric shaver. We were just glad that everything seemed to be back to normal. Our Satanist stopped throwing his feces, and the prayers to Satan halved. The calm patients were calm, the pleasant patients pleasant, and no more teeth left their marks in workers' arms.

This was one of my most creepy experiences as a nurse, but the other times left me with a small shrug, a smile, and a sense of wonder. This one? Just morose, morbid, and a lot of food for thought. Rewriting this makes me want to do certain things, like not link it to the "Never Forgotten" index, but I won't forget him; I just don't have the kind of remembrance as the others. I don't even want to use the same template that I normally use. It's not hate; it's fear of the unknown. It's crazy, but this story makes me nervous, but it's Halloween, and I've convinced myself this is the best attempt at Halloween spookiness I'll ever have, unless I go back to work as a nurse.

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