By Valerie Gibbons
The nursing assistant stopped first at my room on her morning rounds. The RN told her my call light had been on the longest.
I was in a rehab facility to learn to walk again. Lying beneath a hospital sheet and blanket, my body was like gnarled driftwood – thin, twisted, blanched – now floating on a squishy brown bog. The room smelled acrid. I don’t know how long I’d been rotting in place. I was too weak to get to the toilet when it was still dark.
She was ebony wood – strong, stable, and dark. Dressed in blue scrubs and white rubber-soled shoes, she was 4 feet 8 inches of embodied Black resilience. Her round mahogany eyes spoke sincerity before they slowly narrowed to slits. Her thick lips pursed in disapproval as she studied me.
Suddenly, she pivoted, threw back her head, and hurled anger at the open door. “I wouldn’t treat my worst enemy this way!” she hollered at no one and everyone. Her rebuke went unanswered.
Having avenged the twin evils of indifference and neglect, she calmly turned back to me. “Come on baby,” she said, “I’ll clean you up.”
© 2026 Valerie Gibbons
Valerie is a leukemia survivor who writes about her cancer journey and that of others, striving to compose essays that capture the experiences and emotions of confronting “the emperor of all maladies.” She continues work on her memoir, My Closet Needs an Exorcism.
