Admiral Ackbar's Geranium

Yes, that Admiral Ackbar.

This is a 100% true story — but let me preface this by saying I don’t actually like geraniums.

I love a ton of plants, but geraniums don’t do it for me — I don’t have the patience to deadhead them when I’m supposed to so they always wind up looking scraggly.

But I still have a bunch in my front yard, from this home’s prior owner. I had my gardeners cut them back when I was going All Succulent All The Time…but the effers grew back anyways. Around my succulents. So now there’s a whole hostage situation going on, where I can’t water one without watering the others, and on some level I have to respect that.

You’ve heard me talk here before about the imminent brain drain that’ll happen when as many of us that can escape bedside nursing do so post-covid, but I realized I never really gave you an example of what that means, so here goes.

This one just happens to involve a famous person.

A few years ago, I was hanging out with one of my writing besties in Berkeley.

She and her husband were the on-site managers of an apartment complex. It was brutalist-style, all cement, and apparently the reason they redid zoning laws in Berkeley to not allow buildings over a certain height, as the structure was quite ugly.

The whole complex was locked though, and we were hanging out as we so often did, in her living room, with the sliding glass door opened on one side to her small balcony full of plants, and the door to the rest of the complex open to the shared hallway — just desperately trying to catch a breeze.

We were writing together and then had plans to go into San Francisco that evening — when one of her neighbors came by.

He was an older man, talking about how his internet wasn’t working, and asking her what she could do to fix it. He walked right on into her apartment, through the open door, and something was…off.

First off, he was complaining about how he wouldn’t be able to get jobs if his internet didn’t work, which made sense, but…he was so old. I was wondering if he really had to work…. (Nurses are nosy as fuck.) And while he was kempt, it was an -ish situation. I could tell he wasn’t 100% okay. There was something about the way he was walking, stalking back and forth inside her apartment, and the way he said his phrases, angrily demanding satisfaction from her — I wasn’t scared, but I could feel my Something’s Not Right Here nursing alarms going off inside my head.

After my friend had explained to him that he’d have to call his internet service provider to figure things out, and he’d left, she turned to me and said, “Yeah, he just came back from the hospital for dehydration.”

My next thought was, “Goddammit, fuck me.”

I curse in real life as often as I do on here. And I think that particular phrase often, anytime things seem like they’re going in an unfair direction — or when I’m being placed in an unwanted position to be the one to Do Something, whether I’m interested in that or not.

Because as a nurse I happen to know that elderly people get dehydrated easily, and that if your electrolytes get off — particularly with sodium — you’ll start to act funny, because it messes with your brain.

I can’t ignore it, it’s not in my nature, so we walk down to his apartment, which is open in a similar fashion to hers, to at least do a wellness check. We walk right on into his place, and I notice it’s nicely kept up, and he does have a lot of awards related to voice acting on his bookshelves and plaques on his walls. But he’s still being…him.

Not right. Talking wrong — not 100% wrong, but 20% wrong, the kind of wrong you’ve gotta listen to for awhile to realize that it’s off. I pull out my phone and call 911 and we hang out with him, him still complaining all the while about his internet, as the the firetruck pulls in.

Berkeley Fire is really uninterested in trusting my nursing abilities, heh.

And I don’t blame them, I used to do hospital transfers, I know EMS is always busy and they see a lot of shit.

And it doesn’t help that he’s complaining, vociferously, that he doesn’t want them there.

In 911-land, if someone doesn’t want you to give them care, they have to honor that.

They won’t.

They’ll wait for your dumbass to pass out and then they’ll start doing CPR or intubate you or whatever else is appropriate for your care.

So this guy’s all, “Get out of my apartment!” and they’re all, “Sure, gramps,” ready to turn tail, and I’m all, “No. I am a nurse. This man needs to be hospitalized. He was just hospitalized for dehydration and it’s happening again, I’m sure.”

I make them wait there and talk him into at least a vitals check — and by the end of that 5 minute period, their spidey-senses are tingling too. Even though his vitals are normal.

Once the paramedic agrees with me, they strap him on a gurney to take him in against his wishes. My friend calls the man’s emergency contact to let him know he’s going back into the hospital, and we grab our stuff to head into the city.

Halfway out to my car she looks over at me. “You know that guy — he’s Admiral Ackbar.”

And I’m all, “Huh?”

“The guy that says, ‘It’s a trap!’ in the Star Wars films — that’s him.”

And I’m all, “Whhhhhhhaaaaatttttt….” But suddenly all the voice acting awards he’d had on his walls made sense.

We go on and have our evening in SF together and I drop her off afterwards, and she asks me how I think he’ll do, and I say, “Probably not good,” because if you live alone and you’re not getting your intrinsic kick to drink at appropriate times, well, you’re going to become dysregulated if there’s no one else around to do it for you.

And sure enough, a few weeks later, he winds up passing.

He also, like my friend, had a balcony with plants — and his caretaker friend (who didn’t live with him, but who helped him manage his affairs) gave my friend several of them.

And she gave his geranium to me.

So this is Admiral Ackbar’s geranium.

Which is now the one geranium I’m absolutely not allowed to kill, although I haven’t always treated it gently. (In this photo, I have just repotted it into a much, much bigger pot, so that it can take up a prime spot on my deck.)

Whatever that is that I did for that man?

New nurses don’t have that.

Some of it is the breadth of experience — some nursing events you just need to live through, for that experience to sink in — and some of that is gumption. The strength to do the right thing and be bossy when needed. My friend knew no better, and 911 wouldn’t have cared if I hadn’t bullied them into caring.

He’d have just slipped through the cracks.

You might think (if you’re a HCW yourself) that that’s kind of an easy catch, and maybe it is, but it’s the easiest way for me to explain what it’s like to be a nurse moving through the world.

Because I can’t explain what it’s like to just walk into the room, look at someone’s positioning in their bed and color and just know that things are wrong. That ominous sense you get when someone’s about to go septic on you. That pressurized lull before the storm when you say ‘get the crash cart’.

Maybe it’s like being a mom? I don’t know, I don’t have kids, I can’t speak to that.

All I do know is that I can walk into a room at work and if God wants you to live today, I can get you there. But sometimes those extra seconds that my spidey-sense buys you — and my willingness to stare down other providers and get you the attention you need, fearlessly escalating if I have too, when other people are looking at numbers on screen but not seeing you, touching you, smelling you, like I am — that shit counts.

And that’s what’s walking out the door, after all of this — to other jobs, or early retirement. You can’t blame us, we’re tired and sad and we’ve all got PTSD. There’s just gonna be a gap of a few years in there post-covid-times, where you shouldn’t trust any nurse that’s too excited to be working.

They’ll mean well, but they won’t know anything.

— Cassie