Waiting for it.

People wait for it every day: the punchline...the other shoe to fall.....that which they know is coming. Working in a hospital is different from the type of social work that I am used to in that I meet new clients daily. Sometimes I meet three people a day and sometimes it's ten. As a result of numerous incidents in the past year, I have come to determine that the IT that I am frequently waiting for is the racial slur. Whether it is the 80 year old lady who mutters that she doesn't want to return to the nursing home that she came from because there are too many "blacks" there and "they scare [her] with their spiky hair" or the family member of a patient who thinks nothing of referring to one of my nurses as "chink", "spic", "darkie", or "nigger": somehow I can sense it coming 90% of the time.
So today, while I was was speaking to an 83 year old man, who was sailing last week and this week is unable to walk and was getting a blood transfusion as we spoke.....I waited for it. I waited for it while he spoke of the roommate that he had the night before, who happened to be a young black man. I waited for it when he mentioned his doctor from the ER, who happened to be hispanic. I continued to wait for it while we discussed rehab placements, some of which were in a predominantly black part of town and some of which were from an overwhelmingly white part of town. And IT never came. And the more I spoke to him, the more I thought he was decidedly one of the most jovial and inspiring human beings that I have ever seen hooked up to a blood bag.
He and his daughter told me of his many travels, all the sailing that he had done, several women he had loved--including his most beloved deceased wife in whose name he donated several thousand dollars to a local organization for children to attend wildlife camps. They laughed about the time that he participated in a pirate re-enactment just a few years ago and he boasted of the eye patch that he got to wear for the production. He spoke of the university that he attended and joked that his primary physician attended the same institution and surely made ten times the salary that he has made in his lifetime. His daughter blushed when he chuckled that the pirate ship replica that he sailed was later used in a porno. I only hope that I can makemy kids blush like that and still love me like she does when I am that age!
I have a lot of favorite patients, but right now room number 22 is at the top of the list. Not only because he has a great sense of humor, has all of his wits about him, and has all of the spunk of a teenager. But also because the IT that came was unexpected.