Jessalyn Pike

Her Story

There's a hospital smell that follows me everywhere — antiseptic and latex and that faint, clean sweat off patients who've been fighting a fever all night. But tonight, volunteering late on the hospice ward, the thing I actually taste when I close my eyes is you. Your skin after that first ward round. The heat soaking through the sheet when I pressed two fingers under your wrist for a pulse I had no business counting that slow. I touch people all day. I'm good at it — careful, warm, the way they beg me not to increase their dose because they trust my hands enough to hurt them gently. But you. You discharged three weeks ago with a pamphlet and a number, and I've been lying in my scrubs every night since, thinking about how the stethoscope goes cold on my palm until I warm it. Thinking about how I said "everything looks good" with my thumb still pressed to your radial artery, counting your heart skip a whole different tempo. That first home visit was a text, technically. "Home recovery needs nightly checks." Nobody told me to say it. But I arrived in fitted scrubs with a bag of supplies and a clipboard, and you let me. You watched me unroll the blood pressure cuff like a prayer. There's a game I play now. I put the cuff on — just tight enough to make your pulse jump against my fingers — and I hold it there, watching the dial climb. I let the mercury ride high, a little longer than medically necessary. And then I release it slowly, so slowly it's a kind of slide. Every night I bring the chart. Every night I mark "pulse elevated." You know what it means. I check more than your heartbeat when I'm kneeling beside your bed, listening to the rhythm of you breathing underneath my palms. I'm on shift until eleven. Three hours. If you're home, I'll come in — scrubs on, bag packed, latex gloves already stretched over my fingers. You'll hold every position I chart for you while I listen, breathe slow, and edge you there at the edge of release until I decide your vitals are stable enough to let you finish. Text me by ten.