angel of death
Last year, soon after an interstate move, I started vomiting. I could not stop vomiting.
After a couple days I went to the ER, where I had the strangest, most horrific encounter with a nurse whose ego was inexplicably wounded by her being unable to insert an IV in my arm. Her apparent hostility toward me was growing: she seemed to blame my body for this, rather than her technique. Multiple veins were blown and she was becoming more aggressive; it was her violence toward both my arms that was scaring me.
Moreover, this nurse had never identified herself, and she was neither of the practitioners with whom I'd previously interacted that night. I started to ask about the other nurse, the experienced one, whom the original nurse had left to retrieve, when this new, third nurse had walked in instead, to my great confusion. My panic grew in equal proportion to her hostility; I admitted I didn't understand the purpose of the IV at all. Finally I told her that I was verbally declining pain medication. She left the room in a huff. Soon after, the experienced nurse had entered the room, had started yelling at me for being "difficult."
My best friend was sitting in a seat nearby. "What is going on here?" she'd asked him in horror. "That isn't what happened at all."
As I hobbled out of the ER hours later—grateful for the original nurse's return, and for the pain pill she'd given me—I apologized to my friend for my earlier panic. I explained that the nurse's behavior, the way her ego was dangerously tied up in achieving a "successful stick," was the pattern of behavior I would expect from an angel of death: that is, the type of professional caregiver who eventually becomes a serial killer.
Just now, a professional research librarian I follow online posted about asking a nursing student to leave the study lab, as another student had reserved that space. The nursing student, feeling entitled to the space, had become hostile, and so had snapped at the researcher that he "looked unhealthy": a weaponized assessment of someone's health.
I was pretty chilled by this, having recently experienced similar. A nurse, wanting to take me down a peg I guess, had walked in and sniped me from behind with a number of guesses, all wrong, about my "health." The less I responded, the angrier and more insistent she had become.
Now I was texting my best friend about the researcher's social media post. "Weird," my best friend said. "People really don't like boundaries."
"I notice two things," I texted. I bullet-pointed my observations.
- the nursing student probably isn't interested in caregiving; rather, she is interested in making clinical judgments about others' supposed worth and value (morality tied to "health")
In that same parenthetical aside, I'd also included my opinion about Seventh-Day Adventists in general. It's a whole thing with me.
- this is that definition of NPD I was just talking about: "create a problem and then present yourself as the solution"
"What we identify as 'NPD' is actually that 'angel of death' behavioral pattern," I concluded.
"Yep," my best friend said.
Indeed, earlier in the day I'd been on the phone with my bestie, telling her about a viral clip from the latest season of Love Is Blind. In it, a caked-up, beige, iconically-boring young man has been dating an extremely hot doctor. He suddenly sits her down on the couch to explain that his inability to perform intimacy comes down to the fact that he's "used to dating women who" do CrossFit and Pilates on the daily. Apparently, this was a sudden, new issue that had cropped up only after he'd already fallen in love with her and deemed her "perfect"—and then, subsequently, had seen the inside of her house for the first time, had seen the life that she was capable of building without him. Perhaps he had panicked, wondering how he could ever possibly fit into her life or add to it.
What is disturbing is not merely 'narcissism', I said, but more specifically it is this pathological instinct to manufacture an issue—in this case, he was inventing a body issue, a neurosis or perceived deficiency, a "complex"—"and then to present yourself as the solution" to that problem.
"He wants to become the cause of her body issues," I explained, "so he can become the only one who can soothe them. It's to create a dependency on his validation." I said something, then, about my college boyfriend—pathologizing my existence in order to justify his own presence in mine.
And the root of all this, of course, is feeling a sense of competition with your partner. "Which always bodes ill," I said, "because one person might think this is co-op or collaborative, while the other person is constantly playing toward a final 'win state'."
What a "win state" might constitute is especially disturbing, I added; someone who wants to compete with their partner is ultimately hellbent on their destruction, as that is one of the only logical ends.