Twenty-four hours after competing at the 2010 NCAA Division III Track and Field National Championships, two-time All-American distance runner Kevin McCarthy left for Hyden, KY, and a month-long internship in rural medicine with the Frontier Nursing Service, a non-profit devoted to providing comprehensive, primary health care to families in rural underserved areas.
The following is an excerpt from his journal:
Trinity is the only male nurse here.
Trinity Jones is his God-given name. He is married and has two kids.
He is extraordinarily funny and messes with everybody he sees. When he laughs after making a joke, he forms a very exaggerated open-mouth smile and shuts his eyes really tight. When he stands and laughs, which is as often as when he sits, he leans forward and drops his arms limp down in front of him like a puppet and cheeses up and sometimes does a little bob back and forth like on strings.
I asked him about his name. He said it came from his dad’s favorite movies—a series of spaghetti Westerns in which the main character was known as Trinity and had a draw so fast he was said to have “the right hand of the devil.” The Matrix films, Trinity says, ruined his name, for Trinity is now a woman’s name in all respects, except two.
On my day shadowing him, Trinity and I went to the homes of patients who needed follow-up check-ups after their hospital stays. We would be the go-between with the hospital for the patient if they needed further treatment.
One lady we visited had blood clots. Not yet 40 years old, her blood was too thick. She had deep veins (she was also a large woman) and it took a few pokes for Trinity to find a good vessel.
The next place we went was simply a shack. It looked awful. But there was a little puppy there that had a knack for sitting completely in the way and on the only rickety wooden steps up to the trailer, so that you could trip on him and fall (which Trinity almost did). We met a beautiful little girl, no more than four years old, who looked exactly like a Cabbage Patch Kid. She had big old rosy cheeks, long, blonde troll hair that went down to her belly, and big blue eyes. She had lost all four of her top front teeth, so when she smiled (which she did often) it was all toothless, chubby goodness. She was running around barefoot, and her feet, clothes, and cheeks were touched with black that looked like it had been stuck there for a while.
When we came in, she was watching Sponge-Bob on an old, old television, and I started talking to her. She got all excited and showed me ALL of her toys, and all of them put together took up every bit of a tin popcorn can the size of her torso (which she proudly pushed and carried around). They were old McDonald’s Happy Meal toys and the like—real cheap. We played for a little bit, but when we went to check on the lady we were supposed to visit, she was on oxygen and said to Trinity, “Right now I am having chest pain and tingling in my right arm.”
“Uh oh. Sounds like a heart attack. Call the ambulance.”
The ‘amberlance’ came and it was a good thing the woman could walk. There was no way that we were getting the gurney into the house, let alone down the hall. She walked out as we were leaving, and I looked back and waved at the puppy and the kid, who looked very distressed. And as I turned away the little girl yelled, “But… wherz E goin?...He didn’ play wivv me!...My toyz!”
One woman we visited had diabetes but was taking care of her husband, who had severe Alzheimer’s. He would wet the bed so often she could not keep the sheets clean or dry. It was running her ragged.
We went to see another lady who had some kind of cellulitus—the skin on her legs was swollen and dry and red and painful. She was on oxygen in her dark trailer, watching those terrible soaps on her TV.
Trinity and I had her laughing the entire time we were there, though. I would give Trinity a hard time, then he would smart-off back to me, and we kept it up until she was bouncing up and down in her chair she was laughing so hard. Once when I was smarting-off to Trinity, he told the lady that after this examination was over, he was going to throw me off a bridge and be done with me. That made her laugh harder still.
A little later the woman asked if we had anywhere else to go after this and I said “Just one place,” and Trinity said, “Yeah—the bridge.” She laughed and laughed.
Then when I was moving stuff around to help him, Trinity said to the woman, “Ya know, this guy has been really helpful today, believe it or not.” And I said, “That’s right—which is why he is going to knock me out before he throws me off the bridge.” Best laugh yet!
Trinity is about 35, an RN who has worked a whole bunch of different places, from a psychiatric ward to the ER to the operating room, and now in home health. He said that working at the psych ward was fun because he just hung out with them, got to know them, played cards with them. He said every day was extraordinarily different. He was working under an Indian doctor who would call him “Jones.” Trinity imitated his very Indian accent, remembering how the doctor used to say, “Jones, I don’t know what I am doing—Help me! You know these patients better than I do.” The doctor also had a Mercedes but could not drive it because something was wrong with the gears, so he gave it to Trinity for a while.
“I can’t drive this thing,” Trinity said in the doctor’s voice.
Trinity is a handy man—he knows how to fix cars, can weld, works hard, and dabbles a lot. He also has very bad knees that pop and crack in horrible ways when he stands up.
My day with him did not garner any medical knowledge, but I saw the power of humor, the power of taking time with people.
You could tell these women rarely saw other people, had resigned themselves to one form of despair or another. They did not live in nice areas, and even if they did, their trailers were dark and gloomy with poor lighting. There was trash in some of the yards, all but one woman was obese, and they spent most of their days sitting. All but one was elderly, and the one that wasn’t was setting herself up for heart failure in the next 10 to 20 years. She sat on her couch, surrounded by a half-eaten popcorn bag, ash tray full of cigarettes, four empty Coca-Cola cans, and other junk food within arm’s reach.
It was the cracking of smiles on what before seemed worn out and resigned faces that moved me. I think the light that Trinity brings into these homes is as much medicine as the actual diagnosis of these patients’ problems—about which, admittedly, Trinity probably knew only the basics.
He’s there to check the patient’s vitals and to relay quickly any needs that the person might have. He’s there to listen. And, as in the case of the woman who was suffering the heart attack, every now and then, he saves a life.
