Look about you from an aching mind and body, after days of suffering and sleeplessness, and unless you are a rare person and have a soul that sees the sunshine back of everything—you will find the world a place of torture. Look out from despair and loss of the ones you love best, or from failure of will to meet disaster, and everybody may be involved in bringing about your suffering, or in effecting your disgrace.
Look out on the world from the eyes of the immigrant who has lost all his illusions of the land where dollars grow on the street and where everyone has an equal chance to be president, and if you do not cringe in abject humility, you are not unlikely to be insufferably self-asserting, considering that the world has robbed you and that now it is your turn to get all that is coming to you. So you make loud demands in a rude, ordering voice. The nurse is there to wait upon you—and finally you will have your innings.
Look out from the resentful eyes and smarting mind of the negro who is just beginning in a northern city to realize that his boasted “equality” is a farce, and you will try to prove to the white nurse that you are as good as anybody. You are impossible; but back of all your bravado and swagger and rudeness and complaint of neglect because of your color, you realize that you cannot measure up. You know you belong to a different race, most of whose members are daily giving evidences of inferiority; and you are sure that the nurse is thinking that.
Look from the eyes of the “new rich,” or the very economical, and you are going to get your money’s worth out of your nurses.
The nurse who can get back of her patient’s forehead and put her mind there and let it work from the patient’s point of view, will learn a saving sense of humor, will be strict without antagonizing, will clear away a lot of mental clouds and help to make permanent the cure the treatment brings.
One can often judge very truly a patient’s real character by his reaction to his sickness. On the other hand, frequently it only indicates that he has not yet properly adapted himself to a new experience and a trying one. We hear so often, “Why, she’s a different person these days, since she’s feeling better. It’s a joy to do things for her.” She was the same person a while back, but had not learned to accept discomfort. Any of the following list of adjectives we hear applied to our patient again and again by the nurses:
| unreasonable | stubborn | lazy | deluded |
| cranky | resistive | unco-operative | will-less |
| hipped | obsessed | hypocritical | of mean disposition |
| excitable | fearful | exacting | dissatisfied |
| undecided | wilful | self-centered | morbid |
| doubtful | demanding | retarded | abusive |
| depressed | spineless | self-satisfied |
Unpleasant terms they are, and condemning ones if accepted as final. When the nurse realizes that under the same conditions she would probably merit them herself, she becomes more anxious to remove the conditions, and less bent upon blame.
We must admit that the highest type person, when sick of any physical illness, does not deserve such descriptive terms as these. But they are the rare folks, few and far between; while the great mass of us have not acquired more than enough self-control and thoughtfulness for the ordinary routine of life. We are weakly upset by the unexpected. If it is a pleasant unexpected, we are plus in our enthusiasm, and people applaud; if the unpleasant unexpected, we fall short, and people deplore our weakness. If we learn our lesson of self-control and adaptability, and gain in beauty of character through experience, it has served a purpose. But the nurse deals with the average of human nature, and she finds their reaction faulty. Very often, if she is observant, she will discover that a patient responds in a very different way to some other nurse, who somehow finds that “trying” sick woman charming or thoughtful, likable or sweet. Of course, it may be because the other nurse weakens discipline and caters to the patient’s whims; but it is just as likely to be because she has tempered her care and her strictness with understanding. She has grasped the patient’s point of view; and with that start, the chances are 50 per cent. more in favor of the patient grasping and acceding to the wise nurse’s point of view.
Shall we not remember that our trying, cranky, stubborn patient is a sick person, and learn to treat that stubbornness or crankiness as a symptom indicating her need, just as we would a rising temperature?