“At the peak of your hunger, you will want your homes, your neighborhoods, your tiled kitchens and charcoal barbecues.”
— Jennifer Abernathy, “Hunger” (Intima, Fall 2022)
As a nurse working in the ICU, I generally consider food as an afterthought when going about my day. This may be because the nutrition my patients receive appears far from appetizing as a tan sludge slinking through their nasogastric tube and bypassing their precious sense of taste, or because it’s 3 P.M. and I’m running between my patients and suddenly realize that the only thing I’ve consumed all day is a cup of coffee. But as I read Jennifer Abernathy’s piece “Hunger” (Intima, Fall 2022), I was humbly reminded that food within the hospital is more than simply nutrition—it tells us who we are.
In her work, Abernathy, a registered dietician, reveals the ways that food serves as a doorway into our pasts. She writes about listening to patients recall their “grandmother’s banana pudding” and longing for “perfectly steamed white rice” the way one’s mother would make it. By relating food to memories, Abernathy transforms food from being a necessity for keeping us alive physically into an essential ingredient for grounding us all, patients and staff alike, within the sterility and monotony of the hospital.
As I read Abernathy’s recollections, I simmered on one memory of food in the ICU: witnessing a man delight in the meal service’s orange sherbet after he had been NPO—nothing by mouth—all day. After I fed him a spoonful of the cold, tangerine-hued dollop, his eyes lit up; his joy was palpable. In that meal, a story was hidden beneath the surface because as Abernathy points out, “the tastes of… your history will bring you home” and in our desires for food what we “really want is the everyday.”
I saw that hunger for the everyday most acutely on a fall Sunday when caring for a patient who had undergone a successful left ventricular device (LVAD) implantation. As I brought him his breakfast tray, he looked at the coffee and said, “This will do for now.” He continued to explain that what he truly wanted was to be perched on his front porch watching the traffic crawl by and the children board their buses while cupping his own steaming mug of coffee.
I nodded in agreement and thought of shifts when I’d spy an orange and pink box of fresh Dunkin’ Donuts in the break room that someone had graciously bought. I’d munch on a vanilla sprinkled donut and was both in the hospital and seven-years-old, belted into the backseat of my family’s Honda Odyssey after church with a box of donuts warming my lap. Somehow through coffee, through a donut, we could both sample home.
Siobhan McKenna is a writer and managing editor for the women’s publishing company Yellow Arrow Publishing. Most recently, she created and curated Yellow Arrow’s online series of poetry and creative non-fiction, Yellow Arrow Vignette. She earned her bachelor’s degree in creative writing and biology from Loyola University Maryland and a master’s degree in nursing from Johns Hopkins University. In addition, McKenna is an ICU travel nurse in Anchorage, Alaska. Her writing can be found throughout the Yellow Arrow website, Yellow Arrow’s EMERGE zine, and Next Level Nursing. siobhanpatricia.com; IG: sio_han; TW: McK_Siobhan.