Past Prime

The other day, as I walked out of my condominium into the hallway, my 91-year old neighbor, Shirley, was pushing her walker along the carpet faster than she usually does. At least her daughter was with her in case she fell. But the way Shirley looked ahead, not smiling, worried me. “Is there something wrong,” I asked.

“My mom cut her shin,” Shirley’s daughter said. “It looks infected.”

Shirley, all bundled up in her puffy coat, wool hat, and gloves shuffled forward. “We should get going,” she urged her daughter.

Later that day, I visited Shirley so I could check the injury to her shin (though I don’t practice as a nurse any longer, once a nurse always a nurse). The wound, the size of a book of matches, was covered in powder-white gauze, but the surrounding area was bruised. Shirley’s skin was so thin it looked like parchment paper. I carefully felt above and below the dressing, then touched the other leg, making sure both felt equally warm – that’s one way to assess for adequate circulation. But, as I laid my protein dense palm on her wasted legs, her skin seemed to move, as if it might peel right off of her, like a peach past its ripe stage: dehydrated and wrinkled.

The next day, when I yanked the toaster plug from the socket, I cut my finger on one of the prongs. It bled for a while and stopped only after I put pressure on it for five minutes. I put a Band-aide on it, one of those fun Band-aides with a smiley face. While in bed that night, it throbbed and I had to hold it above my head to make it stop.  The next morning when I took the Band-aide off, my finger bled easily and it had a hole in it, not a deep one, but deep enough that I had to keep it covered. Four days after the injury, it still hadn’t closed. Maybe I need a butterfly stitch, I thought. Instead, I decided to keep the hole uncovered for the rest of the day. By day five the hole started to shrink, and on the seventh day it completely closed. A surface layer of missing skin was the only remaining sign of my hasty plug-yanking maneuver.

A week after I initially check on Shirley, six days after my injury, I knocked on her door, hoping that the antibiotics the doctor had prescribed for her had worked and her wound had healed.

“How’s the leg?” I asked.

“It’s better, see.” She lifted her pant leg, showing me her skinny shin. Instead of gauze, a thick black and red scab the size of a half-dollar covered the wound beneath. I ran my hand along her shin, feeling for swelling and heat – signs of infection. The weight of the scab tugged on her skin, creating a ring of creases, like a starburst.

“Keep an eye on that,” I told Shirley. “You’re skin is fragile.”

Back at my place, I slipped some bread into the toaster. Watching the elements heat up to an incendiary red, I thought about Shirley’s 91-year-old skin. How many years do I have left before my skin is as fragile as hers? I’m only forty-seven. I have forty-four more years to go – plenty of time.

The toast popped. I plucked it from the toaster, then un-plugged the cord from the socket, carefully.

Even though the hole in my finger has healed, on its own – no antibiotics, no gauze – I can’t seem to stop rubbing my thumb against the spot of missing skin.