"The Nurse"

Written by Tiffany McKeever
Edited by Angela Hathaway

“The Nurse”

“Cold days are always the worst,” she explains flipping her cigarette around her chapped fingers like a baton. The lit end moves seamlessly through the small cloud of smoke gathering around her hand, slipping over her index finger, under her thumb and back to the correct position. She takes a deep drag, exhaling the smoke partway way before sucking it back into her lungs through her nose, “The cold days… always the worst.” She exhales with a sigh. She snubs the last of the cigarette on the bottom of her shoe as her short impromptu break ends, and moves back inside the old building with quick steps.

The current day isn’t cold; rather it’s warm with a slight breeze blowing her fading blonde hair across her face. This woman has harsh eyes, a cold blue, that reflects the endless days of stress and shows years on her life. She’s short, but muscular for woman 45-years-young. She’s wearing her faded cotton scrubs that were a dull yellow with small bleach spots across the surface.

The nurse, who didn’t wish to be identified, works for the Bill Graham Free Clinic on the corner of Haight and Clayton Street. She works an average of 40 hours per week, for wages she considers to be significantly lower than they should be for the amount of work she does.

When the clinic opens its doors at 8:45 a.m. sharp, there’s usually a line outside. Today there was no line out the door, but three men in various stages of delirium are settled about in worn chairs shuffling their ragged clothes about and trying to calm their quaking legs.

Most days people come in for drug recovery therapy, counseling and methadone shots, while others come in for flu shots or the occasional wound, but the clinic was established for those suffering the effects of The Summer of Love, when poverty came easy and drug addiction hit hard.

The clinic is in the center of upper Haight, and is a community beacon and the first of its kind. In 1967, Bill Graham unofficially titled “Dr. Rock Medicine” established the clinic with $100 of his own money and $500 donated from a local priest. The clinic didn’t have a basis of operation until the Summer of Love ended and he purchased the building its been operating out of since.

The idea was simple; volunteer medical professionals and others could come to Golden Gate Park and donate food and their time to the thousands of young people living in the area. They treated illness of all kinds but after the Summer of Love, and specialized in drug and alcohol recovery. The nurse said some of their patients have been coming there since the clinic was established and some have died within it walls.

The Bill Graham Clinic helped establish several other free clinics around the area that help more than100,000 uninsured, homeless, and low income San Franciscans a year

The nurse is also the front desk attendant. As people shuffle in and out of the clinic, she asks them to fill out a simple form and gives return appointments for those who need it. She acts as a receptionist when her services aren’t needed by the several doctors on duty. The clinic generally operates by appointment but after four-o-clock accepts walk-ins until closing. Patients are taken in the order received, or occasionally by need depending on how severe the case is.

Some days she finds it hard to work; the days when the homeless people, in her words, “few cards short of a full deck” come in. “Once a man came in and accused me of working for the government and he grew violent.” She chucked sorting through paper work, “I do, in a way, work for the government, so he was accurate in his assumptions, and I can understand how the government would make someone violent…anyway, it took three people to restrain him and get him out.”

But she still dislikes the cold days of all. “I can deal with the crazy, strange, drunk, but the cold days break my heart.”

On cold days the clinic is flooded with people from the street who may or not need any medical assistance. Sometimes people come in just for a warm place for a few hours, or a warm bed during the storms on those days, she admits she wishes there was more funding for a new larger building and more staff.

“We just can’t help everyone.” She says, “Sometimes we have to give people the boot. It hurts me to have to send people back out into storms but there’s nothing we can do.”

Flu season is a serious problem. The Clinic offers free vaccinations to the needy but sometimes the vaccinations run short and they have to turn people away until later dates. The elderly, especially those living on the street, can’t afford to wait several more days.

As a non-profit organization that’s run primarily on grants, donations, and government funds, the clinic has managed to gain a key operational staff of people who do the work for the love of humanity, volunteers from hospitals, psychiatry practices, students, and anyone who feels they have something to offer who give more than they could possible hope to receive. Most staff personnel aren’t paid very well, but still some would rather take pay cuts than turn people out onto the street.

Some of the other staff members agreed with her and wished they had the funding to become a full hospital.

“The problem with the free clinics established around the city is that we only have the resources of the average clinic. Sometimes there’s health issues we can’t treat and we have to either give them a referral to a hospital or send them away. There simply aren’t enough beds in the city… but we’re making the most with what we have and I think we’re doing a fine job of it.”

Still, despite the issues she has with her job she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. She’s been an employee with the clinic for less than decades and has seen everything anyone could ever imagine. She’s gone home from 15-hour-plus shifts, had nightmares about patients she couldn’t help, and attended services for those when help didn’t come soon enough. But she said she wouldn’t change a thing about her life.

The good outweighs the bad ten-fold, and her reward for a hard day’s work is knowing that she was able to save someone’s life or prolong a life. She admits it stopped being a job a decade ago and became a lifestyle.

“The cold days are always the worst,” she says as she ushers the next man beyond the white doors towards his room. She pauses for a moment before she adds, “Always the worst, but we do the most good on those days.”

~Tiffany McKeever
May 03, 2007