NURSE | Rosa Singer
When I wake to find my feeding tube halfway out of my stomach, like a long snake, I
decide to pull it out. Its flexible but stiff body rubbing through me the way a straw squeaks
in the hole of a plastic, soda lid. Its color a reddish-brown and covered in goo. I call the
hospital, and several days later I’m on the operating table in Interventional Radiology
where the team tells me I shouldn’t have pulled it out. The pathway has begun to heal over,
and it will be difficult to reinsert without hospitalization, but they will try. I don’t know
how to say this next thing, but my heart began to race. Perhaps, it was because my eyes
grew wide like silver dollars, or maybe it was the heart rate monitor that tipped her off, but
the nurse, standing alongside my head with her blue hair cap, gloved hands and bright green
eyes, asked me if I’d like to listen to some music. Then, she sang to me. She sang every
word, knew every song, every lyric, I sang along, as they tried to ram and jam the tube
through my stomach, pushed in ways the fentanyl did not numb. She sang, not shy and
holding my hand, the entire album and the next, as the surgeons strategized, spoke of what
else to try. She and I sang love songs and loss songs, soul and R&B, like a doula helps a
woman birth, or a sister or a friend says, I’m with you, then sings our suffering or sings it
away. Finally, when it was done, she wheeled me to my room, handed me a cup of water,
a plastic bag of syringes, some gauze and tape, post-op instruction and a pink Post-it note.
It said, artists I love, songs for the road.
Rosa Singer is a poet, writer of creative non-fiction and the recipient of a double-lung transplant. Her writing explores braving the body, medical narratives, interdependence and the natural world. Passionate about the arts in health, she teaches expressive writing for patients and caregivers through the Lung Transplant Foundation. She also speaks at the University of Washington School of Medicine, on the topic of delivering and receiving serious news. Over a decade in the field of international development, working on girls’ sexual and reproductive health, showed her the importance of health as a human right and how stories remind us of our shared humanity. Today she writes and breathes next to a 200-year-old cedar tree in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.