Cold Wet Sheet Pack
We welcome guest blogger, Eileen Vorbach Collins. Eileen has a degree in nursing from the University of Maryland and an MA in pastoral care from Loyola. Her essays have been widely published, receiving several literary awards and two nominations for a Pushcart prize. Her essay collection, Love in the Archives, a Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, was a Foreword Indies finalist and recipient of the Sarton Women's Book Award for memoir.
Her screams, filled with fury, could set the place on fire. It’s your first week on the job. You want to scream with her but instead you dial the operator and say you need help.
The voice over the hospital-wide PA system is calm but insistent and for this you are grateful.
“All available female staff to Four West.”
“All available female staff to Four West.”
The door slams shut as the first helpers arrive on the locked ward. The running water as you fill the tub almost blocks the sound of her screams. You want to make the water warm, add some bubbles and climb in.
Instead, you dump in bucketsful of ice till the water is so cold the white sheets grow stiff as they’re submerged. Three staff members surround the still-screaming woman, restraining, disrobing her, forcing her arms into a gown, open at the back exposing her pale buttocks. You wring the sheets out, lay them on a gurney, with your cold, cold hands. Collectively, you lift the woman, place her on the cold, cold sheets, gown off and she is shivering, screaming still. The swaddling begins. There’s a method to this madness after all.
Pinned at her sides, her hands are no longer able to seek purchase with another’s flesh or rake nail marks in her own face. Rip out tufts of her own hair. The shock of the cold is arresting.
They once called this hydrotherapy. Cold wet sheet pack is more descriptive. It’s gone out of favor, but some still find it useful. Patients request it when they feel they’re losing control. Drug-free sedation. Antianxiety wrap. No known lasting side effects. A dry cotton blanket is wrapped tightly over the wet sheets. Then you cover her with another one.
It’s just the two of you now. The others, their work here finished, have gone back to their own units to resume the interrupted game of Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. To shout out a solution to the word puzzle of Wheel of Fortune.
You offer a cool drink. She sips through the straw, her cocooned body wracked with sobs. Warming is rapid. Lights dimmed, voices low, a calm descends upon the room. Swaddling an infant is said to help ease the shock of the transition from the tight confines of the womb to the open space of the world. You wipe the woman's tears and whisper, You’re going to be okay. Rest now.
And all these years later, you still think about those cold sheets and wonder, what if it had been you on the other side of the sheet? Swaddled, calm, a method to your own madness.
