"Our patient wanted you to have this," a nurse thrust me two clear plastic packages. Walnut cookie, the wrappers read in fancy gold italicized print.
It felt like I'd spent too long seeing the patient. She was a Cantonese-speaker, and the twenty minutes it had taken to get an interpreter on the phone and figure out that the woman had pneumonia had felt like an eternity. During that time, four new patients had manifested in our pod. During that time, the patient had apologized to me three times for peeing in her pants. "I've been coughing so much, doctor, that sometimes I pee a little," the interpreter stated on speakerphone. I wondered momentarily if the interpreters ever slipped into the third person.
"Please, there's no need to apologize," I spoke into the air, and a string of words I couldn't understand emerged from the phone, followed by a string of words I did understand: "Could I please have a maxipad, or better yet, a diaper?" I helped the patient wriggle out of her pants, which were indeed damp, and covered her up in two layers of warm blankets. Throughout the physical exam, she apologized again, twice, and then asked for a diaper and maxipad again, twice.
I exited the room and, somewhat reluctantly, went hunting around the various stock rooms and carts for an adult diaper, all the while aware that there were other patients waiting to be seen. I cursed myself for not knowing where simple supplies were and felt frustrated that everyone else was too busy for me to ask for help. It was a pleasant surprise to find diapers in the third tower I inspected, and the patient thanked me profusely when I delivered one to her. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," she spoke in English in a heavy accent.
When the nurse tossed me the cookies later on in the night, my heart melted a little bit.
"She said it's for Chinese New Year," the nurse told me.
It's really because I brought her that diaper, I thought to myself.
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