The other day, a woman walked onto the unit. This is not a rare occurrence, of course. She was dressed in street clothes and was a complete stranger to me. She was talking to a dietician that was walking by, and the dietician came up to me and indicated that the woman needed to ask a question. I assumed that she was there to see a patient and right off the bat asked her what patient she wanted to see. “Well… I’m the patient,” she replied.

I love when patients come back to the unit to visit, especially if they had been there for a long time. As soon as she said her name, I recognized her and remembered what room she’d been in. How funny that even though I had taken care of her a few times, and helped other nurses who were taking care of her, I didn’t recognize her, even though she has a slight deformity of her eye.

Or maybe it’s not that surprising that I didn’t recognize her. The whole time I knew her, she was wearing a standard-issue hospital gown, just like everyone else. She had multiple tubes and lines and her face was covered in tape from being intubated. It’s odd to see someone that you’ve had a certain mental picture of suddenly standing before you, wearing street clothes and cracking jokes. She looked like a person, not a patient.

She was very shy and kept saying that she didn’t remember any of us, didn’t remember her time in the unit at all. This is quite common; even when patients seem alert and oriented to us at the time, sometimes when they come back they say that they don’t remember it at all. This mostly happens with patients who had been sedated on ventilators, or very ill.

I think it took a lot of courage to come and visit a place where people may or may not recognize you, a place that you know you spent a lot of time but remember nothing of. I was very happy to see that she looked so good. I remember wondering, when she was a patient, if she was going to make it out of the hospital alive.

Which reminds me - many months ago, 2 people walked onto the unit and I recognized one immediately - he was the husband of the person that had spent almost a month in our unit. The 2nd person, of course, was that patient. If he hadn’t walked in with her, I wouldn’t have recognized her in a million years. (For one thing, she was very short - you don’t get a good idea of how tall someone is while they’re in the bed!)

I love when patients come back to visit. Sometimes we never know what’s become of them unless one of us remembers to ask one of the docs.