Guy Friends

So I am again seeing the guy I was seeing for a year and a half and then broke it off with, but it isn't what you're thinking. We really are friends.

"He only wants you around for one thing," I was told by a so-called friend soon after. "I'm a guy, too, and I know about these things."

Oh, yeah?--so that's why you are talking to me, buddy?

"If you think it's friendship, you're in denial."

Well, gosh, I know what friendship looks like...a real friend is that rare person you can tell the truth to. That doesn't come around every day, don't I know it.

My father was a talker. He wasn't an emoter, but he liked to think, and he liked to discuss. He particularly liked theology. Raised a Bible-quoting Baptist, he met my mother when they were in their late teens, and by the time I was born (before either of them turned twenty) she'd turned him atheist, merely by listening to his beliefs and replying, "You really believe that stuff?"

My grandmother tried to repair the situation by whisking me off to overnights that culminated in a trip to church on Sunday morning; when I was returned home, my father sat me on the couch for a debriefing. I was six or seven at the time this went on.

"You know, there is no God," he said. I nodded. "You know that all that stuff your grandmother told you is made-up stories," he went on. I agreed. (I particularly didn't like it when my grandmother had informed me "if you made a mistake printing the Bible, you would go to Hell because it was a holy book and had to be perfect!" I thought that was horribly unfair and an odd thing to bring up to a kid. My grandmother was a little whacky, as my father well knew.)

My mother was the quiet and reclusive one. She wasn't the type to have girlfriends over for coffee and chat in the afternoons. She still isn't, and neither am I.

I remember one sunny fall day we were all driving home from the apple orchard, and my father said to my mother, "When I throw this apple core out the window, where do you think it will hit?", and the two of them, only high school graduates, started a discussion about angles and velocity that lasted several apple cores out the car window and most of the way home.

I always had guys as friends. I was unassuming, like my mom, and easy to talk to, like my dad, and boys talked to me like friends. I never had a boyfriend until I was almost seventeen, and that was an overwhelming experience involving lots of hurt feelings and obsessive feelings and the tiny, immature beginnings of a capacity for passion--all too much for a sixteen-year-old, by far. My next boyfriend worked out better--a sweet guy to pal around with, someone I could never have fallen in love with but enjoyed pretending to, and when I broke up with him he was sad and called me hopefully for a long time afterward.

My first boyfriend and I developed an annoying and irresistible pattern of getting together for a few weeks every few years when we were both in between relationships, getting on each other's nerves and quarreling, and then parting ways in an offended furor. We did that for over a decade, believe it or not.

I have been single since my husband moved out in late 2004. A few men have bought me dinner over the years, and that has been nice for sure, but what I really crave is an ear to listen and some sound advice and a laugh or two. In recent months, with this big turmoil going on with me and my ex-husband, the people who have been the most rock-solid for me have been two men. One is a guy I work with who has become a real friend--the kind of friendship that works both ways--and he gives me hugs, and is quite amused and understanding when I start to squirm. The emotive thing will always be a mildly alien area for me, I think.

The other was the guy I was seeing for a year and a half. He was a physics major in college, and I'm sure he could solve my parents' apple core problem in about ten seconds. After two weeks of me cutting things off, I e-mailed him again. I considered it carefully first, but there is always the element of the unknown...is this one burned out? Can we really be friends?

I went to see him last Thursday. It had been three months since we had seen each other. I told him what had been happening with the ex and we ordered takeout. With the Discovery Channel in the background, we talked about other stuff, made each other laugh, ate the food,  played some footsie and fell asleep.

I hear that best friends make the best marriages. That's all I'm saying about me and committed relationships. I don't know if that's anyplace I can get to, but I do know that I'll take one good friend over a boyfriend any day...and it sure does help that I know how to be good friends with guys.

"When Will You Be Back?"

I was down on the floor, entertaining a two-year-old, while her mother helped my patient onto the commode beside us. My patient was the grandmother. We were in one of the bedrooms, the one with the most comfortable bed and the TV. My patient cried and wailed with each shuffling step, but her daughter was unfazed, so I decided to let them do what they were doing--this was their life, not mine, I was a visitor here--and keep my focus on the child. She was playing with a toy truck, and had it drive up and down her mother's leg until her mother batted it away with her hand. I thought of blowing up a glove balloon, but decided that she was too young and might chew it.

The misery in the room was a very basic kind of misery, the kind caused by physical suffering. I felt how huge it was, and how the child with the truck and her matter-of-fact mother took some of the heft out of it. It can be easy to relieve suffering. The first and hardest part is not shutting down in the face of it.

My patient hadn't slept in two days from the pain. Nobody had called me, because they didn't think of it--I was coming Tuesday, right? They would see me Tuesday. I tell patients and families all the time, "You call any time day or night, we can help you," but so many people are so used to getting by on their own that they don't understand what that means. I walked through the door, and saw a woman with a gaunt, shadowed face, her eyes gleaming with pain, and crying. I felt the horror of it (and hers was an especially terrible cancer, with tumors actually starting to push up from under her skin on her torso, and leg, and back; her insides were so full of tumors, there was no more room for them to grow), and felt the battleax nurse in me get annoyed, too-- "This was avoidable, people! What were you all thinking??"--and also felt how great the need was for somebody to steer this ship away from the shoals. Well, I could do that, and I did.

The thing is, I get to leave. I write out instructions, we discuss the plan, I reassure, I stress the importance of calling if there is a problem, but then I get to pick up my nursing bag and walk out the door. I have to make sure that I have left them with more than bottles of pills and written schedules; I have to be sure that I have given them some nameless something that can help them get through the hours before the next nursing visit. I don't choose to identify what that something is. With each person, it's a little different.

I offered the services of the social worker, and the chaplain, and the home health aide, and tried my best to get them to accept one other discipline in their home other than the nurse (because I know how much it helps--they didn't, couldn't), but they turned all of it down. "All we need is you," they told me,"we trust you."

I have another cancer patient two towns over. He once weighed 300 pounds, mostly muscle, 6 feet tall, and photos of him from years ago startle me, because it could not possibly be the same man, save the sparkle in his eyes. He's now about 145. He used to train horses; he's from horse country, out around Kentucky, and never married. "I couldn't, living that kind of life, I travelled all the time and worked from 5am to midnight. Not that I didn't have lady friends through the years!"

I pulled up a chair, and we talked. I've been seeing him for three months now; he hates the pain, so whenever it starts getting ahead of the medication, he tells me, and we adjust it. He was amazed that the pain meds we used on him worked so well--he'd been taking MS Contin from the oncologist and it hadn't done much. A lot of our talks initially were about how wonderous life had become without being plagued with pain all the time. A full night's sleep was next to heaven. He was able to go for walks again, and was happy to be able to get the the grocery store and get his shopping done without having to have anybody help him.

As time went on, he started telling me stories of his boyhood in the Kentucky hills in the forties. "Do you wish you could go back there? Would you if you could?" I asked, and he answered with a slow smile, "Naw, I'm done with that place. I'm content here."

He told me about his travels, and life on the road, and being poor. One day he was wearing a T-shirt with a decal of wolves on it, and he said, "Somebody saw this today and thought that I was an animal lover!" I laughed and said, "C'mon, I bet you're wearing that because it was fifty cents at the flea market and it fit you." "You are absolutely right!" he grinned.

He's a charming but solitary man. He has pictures of the Virgin Mary on his walls, "just in case," he says, but I don't believe him. He's an atheist, and was never a Catholic. I'll bet there is some other reason that he just hasn't told me yet.

He started to fall off about a month ago, and gave me a worry--sleeping all the time, no more walks, the pain in a new place--but then righted himself and had a few weeks of feeling better. Than this week I went to see him and his face, always pale, was gray around his eyes and cheekbones, and his eyes were dull and troubled. "What's wrong?" I asked, and we talked about it. It wasn't so much the pain and the breathing problems as the weakness and the futility of it all. "I know I won't get any better, but I want to. I don't like this."

"I wish I had a magic nursing wand," I told him,"and could take it all away from you."

"So do I."

"Yeah. But I can't. All I can do is see you on Wednesday. And Friday, too. I'll keep a close eye on you. How's that?"

"Yeah, I think I need it."

I stood up to get my stethescope from my nursing bag, and he said suddenly, "You are beautiful."

I didn't know how to respond at first. "Well, I'm having a really good hair day," I answered, and he gave me a grin. The gentle sparkle in his eyes was back, if only for the moment.

He is a man who takes it as it comes, and rolls with it, and looks for the humor in everything. He also takes life very seriously. He's like me in that way.

And I'm his nurse. I'll be back at the end of the week.