i'm beautiful

If this is Monday, then I want nothing to do with the rest of the week. According to the rest of the nurses, this week has nothing on the last one, so it seems that I did, in fact, choose the best time to take a vacation; I just wish the palm trees and ocean breezes didn't seem quite so far away.

It all came down to simple mathematics, really. At the start of the day we had zero empty beds. By ten o'clock, we had found a total of five that could be discharged. There were eighteen in the admissions tent. For those of you not following, that's thirteen patients who were going to be sleeping on the dock if we didn't figure something out.

So figure we did. We sat in what should, by all rights, be a fifteen minute meeting for an hour and a half. We made deals and swapped people around and pulled coordinators away from their coordinating to consult, and by the end of it all we had managed to find space for every single patient. Provided two didn't show up, which we were pretty much counting on, since it was raining and over here, no one really likes to go anywhere in the rain. (Even, strangely enough, to get a free surgery. But I digress.)

One of those discharges was Aissa, and it broke my heart just a little to say goodbye to her. By seven thirty this morning, she was draped over my lap, gesturing to my iPod and holding the speaker to her ear to hear Audrey that much better. We hung out for most of the morning, and I got to hear all the new words she's learned this past week. This one! Cup! Ballooo! (She hasn't seemed to master the last n on that one, and usually doesn't even go for the word; sign language is more her thing.)

When it came time for rounds, we were near her bed for a while, hashing out the details of her transfer to the Hospitality Centre. When the crowd moved on and the doctors all left, Beth and I headed back to Aissa's corner. I pulled at the tape holding the end of her bandage, and she looked up at me with bright eyes. I nodded, and she reached up to start unwinding the gauze. A little at a time, she unwrapped her face until the last pieces of tape were removed. She circled her finger around her head again, asking me if I'd be the one to place the new bandage, and when I shook my head, her smile started to grow.

Little by little, with the help of Sarah, we explained it all to her. That she'd be going to a new place to stay, a place where she can go outside whenever she wants. That she doesn't need the bandage anymore. That she can eat whatever she wants now. She can eat rice, the one thing she's been craving for the last twenty-four days.

And then I taught her one more sentence. And when she headed out the door she shouted it us all of us.

I'm beautiful!

Aissa has a new face and a new life ahead of her. And for the rest of the day, when things continued to teeter on the edge of something that very much resembled chaos, I just remembered her little voice chirping back at me.

I'm beautiful.

Beautiful.