Nurse Jen

For quite some time now I have a serious weakness for nurses. My mother used to be one, but mockingly I have come to the conclusion that my admiration towards nurses has developed despite that and not because. I do remember though, how much I was impressed when my mother told me a story about a patient. My mother was 19 years old and the patient was a 27 year old convicted murderer. He had been admitted for appendicitis and his inflamed rudimentary organ had been surgically removed. There was a guard in front of his room 24/7. The dangerous patient, however, did not want to go back to his cell. He preferred the confined, near-sterile space of his hospital room and in order to avoid the harsh and dirty environment of jail, he smeared his own excrements into the fresh wound, deliberately prolonging his stay at the ward and herewith the close proximity of my mother, who happened to be his nurse.

At the end of my first year of medical school, I went to Santa Barbara in California to work as a nurse’s aide at the local hospital. This is a mandatory part of medical school to make the young and cocky doctors-to-be more familiar with the work done by the nurses. I was assigned to ward 6C (hematology and oncology) at the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital and during one month my days consisted of giving sponge baths, cleaning sheets, folding sharp hospital corners, transport patients to radiology, disposing the contents of urinals, changing diapers, holding kidney trays in front of patients whose chemotherapy induced nausea had just pushed them towards vomiting, taking temperatures, checking i.v.’s, etcetera. But soon I learned that these elements just make up the skeleton of the work. The real soul of the job comes from the personality of the ones performing these duties.

There and then in 2001, I met nurse Jennifer Hubbard, 22 years old and fresh from nursing school at the University of South California. One day I was assigned to be her aide and it opened my eyes. Not only because of her beauty – she was stunning: a brunette with deer-like greenbrown eyes intensely radiating under long eyelashes, long and tainted fingers with manicured nails and perfect white teeth always exposed as she never stopped smiling – but mostly because she brought a personal touch to the work she did. Cheerful, tender, vivacious, compassionate and attentive; signaling deteriorations as well as improvements in patients’ conditions and acting accordingly. She seemed to naturally master every aspect of her job.


I was not the only one to notice. No matter how awfully sick they felt, patients would brighten up when she entered the room. She was genuinely interested and had a second nature for making people feel at ease. That included me, even though I remember how she once put a hand on my shoulder and I felt like sparkling water was running through my veins towards my brain and abdomen. Many times afterwards, it took much less from nurses for me to fall in love with them, but Jennifer was the first one. We kept in touch occasionally, and I have been contemplating on that small possibility our paths would cross again. To catch up, so to speak.

Today I found out that she had a car accident. On an early Saturday morning she was on her way to ward 6C. She swerved of the road and crashed on the shoulder. Her car flipped over. When the paramedics came her heart was no longer beating and her lungs had given up all attempts to breath. She died at the scene.


JENNIFER SHAY HUBBARD 8 SEPTEMBER 1977 - 15 MAY 2010