My Patient Didn’t Have a Face

Nurses Notes — Tales from my nursing career — 1968–2012

Nurses and other health professionals see things that they will never forget — even if they want to.

I could smell death even though I was still standing on the narrow stoop of the small Cape Cod. I hadn’t yet knocked and the smell, the cloying, sickening odor of someone dying of cancer, was almost overwhelming.

I’d been a nurse for more than ten years and I’d smelled impending death before, but never like this — always in a hospital room or, more recently as a visiting nurse, in the sick room of a patient dying at home — never while I stood outside, hand raised ready to knock.

In the few seconds it took for me to knock and the door to be opened, I wondered why I was standing there. What was I doing? Why, knowing what I might see inside, had I agreed to come to this house?

I was the visiting nurse liaison for the local hospital. I interviewed patients before their discharge and set up home care services. I was also a member of the Cancer Committee, started by a social worker and the local oncologist. Both had told me I was the perfect choice to make this home visit.

The social worker had received a call from a woman’s family. The family could no longer care for her at home and wanted her placed in the county…