Behind Closed Doors: Putting the Nurse in Nursery

Beautifying my workplace, one plant and flower at a time.

April flooding brought May flowers to sunny California, where I’m on assignment. The Golden State has seen green pastures, lush mountains and more fertile farmland than we’ve had in decades. Even my home state of Arkansas is surprisingly green for this time of the year — lawn mowers run from dawn til dusk, and the flowers are simply spectacular.

Every shift I envision bringing the great outdoors into the places where I care for patients at various stages of their surgical journeys. Here are the ingredients of botanical gardens I’d bring to facilities everywhere — selected for aesthetic, symbolic and snarky reasons.

• Aster. As in the de-Aster in my room after some marathon case.

• Baby’s Breath. In every room, if we don’t have to help L&D with a C-section.

• Cocklebur. That surgeon who is always under somebody’s saddle every Monday morning.

• Crabgrass. The nurse stuck with Dr. Cocklebur.

• Creeping Thyme. Those endless Monday mornings; the time until lunch; and seeing 14:30 with no relief in sight.

• Four O’clocks. Hello! Still waiting for my relief.

• Forget-Me-Nots. To all the staff I’ve worked with at Adventist Health in Bakersfield, Calif.; Tehachapi, Calif.; Littleton, N.H.; Bradley, Conn.; and Hutchinson, Kan. If I weren’t retiring, I’d want to go back to any of them in a New York Second.

• Foxgloves. Digitalis at your service.

• Gladiolas. Little Miss “I don’t like it in here.” Better get GLAD about it. It’s your Monday.

• Ivy. One of the top patient complaints.

• Masterwort. Sounds like something for which you’re going to need a laser, goggles and HEPA mask.

• Morning Glory. All those people who come in at 06:30 in a good mood.

• Mum’s the word. No one will keep your secret.

• Obedient plant. Something you’ll never see me with.

• Passion Flower. What I — despite everything I’d seen, heard and smelled over my multiple decades — still have for OR nursing.

• Prickly Pear. An interminable shift with a surgeon and circulator who can’t stand each other.

• Quaking Grass. The doctor you wouldn’t send a Prickly Pear to.

• Quaking Aspen. The new grad for at least the first six months.

• Rose. Tall, gorgeous and smells wonderful. You will even overlook that sometimes thorny attitude. Makes you want a dozen of them.

• Stinkweeds. A ruptured appendix.

• Sweat Pea. That relief you feel when you finally get a pee break.

• Tulips. Bring on the Botox & collagen cocktail.

• (Miss)Aster. The scrub tech in OR 2. You know who you are, and some day these readers may, too.

• Clematis. A pretty little plant that is often found around people’s mailboxes. Embarrassing, but I always manage to misspell and mispronounce it as chlamydia. This perpetual Freudian slip tells you a lot about the words and phrases that get cut from this column each month.

• Impatiens/Touch Me Nots. Those impossibly skittish patients who don’t give you a head’s up about their fear of IV sticks.

• Marigold. Humble little flower, but boy does it smell. Good way to mask those stinky cases we do.

• Weeping Willows. No crying in the OR! OSM