Ariel Bugosh Boswell is a nurse and writer who lives in Rochester, Minnesota. She strongly believes poetry can help to heal the body, mind and soul. Her poem “Late Night” appears in the Spring 2020 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
Michael Fredrick Geisser’s “Night Trip” (Fall 2015 Intima) takes place at the same time as my poem “Late Night,” that dark lonely hour when one should be asleep. Geisser cannot go back to sleep—he needs to go to the bathroom. Yet his every step demands exertion and deliberation. He recalls winning 15 years ago in a race with a teenager: “What I would give to run like that again.” Now, he notes, “when I move about using my walker there’s an added concern besides extended time: the knowledge that I might fall over and get hurt or killed.”
From the caregivers’ side, falls are a constant danger, and one we fight with technology and organization. In both hospital and outpatient settings, initiatives, alarms and 1:1 assistance are used to reduce this leading cause of preventable injury and death. Despite our efforts and controls, like the IV pole wheels in my poem murmuring “(don’t fall) (don’t fall),” patients do fall.
At night in Geisser’s home, his only help is his wife Anna, whom he feels guilty to wake: “She needs her sleep. Works like a slave to run our errands, AND cook our meals, AND maintain our household—all while tending to my every need.” So he sets off on a quest for the bathroom, a pilgrimage full of danger and insight.
Geisser reflects as he walks—about loved ones he has lost, about the changes in his love life, about the God he does not believe in but still thinks about: “If I’m wrong, will God forgive me because I’ve put so much effort into the issue, regardless of the answer I arrive at? Will God let me get to my goal, the toilet?”
At last after a 22-minute, 40-foot transit, he reaches his goal: “I lean back onto the backrest and stare at the moonlight that is coming through the cut glass window…” Instead of the sunlit stained glass of Chartres, Geisser’s pilgrimage ends with the moonlit glass of his bathroom, and then he turns for bed.
Geisser faces the battle we all do, between dependence and independence, running and falling. Sometimes we all need to ask for help. We are all fellow pilgrims helping each other put one foot in front of the other, continuing step by step on our journeys, down hospital corridors and home hallways to recovery.
Ariel Bugosh Boswell is a nurse and writer who lives in Rochester, Minnesota. She strongly believes poetry can help to heal the body, mind and soul. Boswell has worked as a nurse at Mayo Clinic since 2012 as an inpatient float nurse and in outpatient primary care. She has facilitated Literature and Medicine sessions at Mayo Clinic to encourage reflection and writing since 2017. A registered nurse with a BA in Anthropology from Davidson College and BSN from Minnesota State University, Boswell spends her free time with her husband Chris Boswell, their two young children and their dog. Her poem “Late Night” appears in the Spring 2020 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine