Honourable Nominee Manny Martinez
Humouring his patients to keep them upbeat
May 7, 2010
Valerie Hauch
TORONTO STAR
The fear of the needle made me cry.
But Manny thread the needle
on the very first try . . .
Without him my treatment
would have been a lot more scary,
He has coached and advised me
and left me less hairy . . .
— Eve Loek
Eve Loek wears a close-fitting hat when I meet her at Princess Margaret Hospital. It makes me focus more on her bright face and beaming smile.
I've just told her the whimsical poem she wrote to nominate nurse Manny Martinez for the Toronto Star Nightingale Award made me laugh.
“I wrote the poem as a gift for him,” says Loek, a 32-year-old Mississauga phys-ed teacher who has just finished three months of treatment at PMH for ovarian cancer. “I wanted to give him something — so you would know how much he meant to me.”
Martinez was the registered nurse who'd hook Loek up by IV to a machine that dispensed the chemotherapy drugs. “I was difficult, I think. I was really kind of emotional about getting the needle,” she says. “But he was always able to do it quickly.
“Knowing that what's getting put into you is toxic. Mentally, that's tough to deal with,” says Loek, who says she's been healthy and athletic all her life and was bowled over when she got her cancer diagnosis.
Coping was easier when she came in for treatment, because Martinez is “so very personable and professional and very good at his job. And, on top of it, very genuine — he doesn't make it a negative experience.”
Loek would sit with a few other patients, mostly young guys with testicular cancer, getting chemo in a small area that contains a television and comfortable chairs. Martinez would introduce everyone. Depending on what regimen of drugs patients are getting, they can be sitting there for 20 minutes to two hours. It's tiring.
“But Manny's approach puts a smile on your face. It's not a fun thing to have to do,” says Loek. “He made the time pass by. He counts down the days with you and he knows when your last treatment is.”
There's a ritual in the chemo ward that involves a large, brass bell next to a door. When someone finishes their treatment, they give the bell a vigorous ring. “It's liberating. You know the date you're finishing and you can't wait,” says Loek.
It's a defining moment for the nurses, too.
“We all clap — and there's always tears,” says Martinez, who's just ended a shift at PMH and still looks fresh-faced and rarin' to go.
He's grateful to Loek for nominating him for the Nightingale and “amazed” at being chosen as one of three honourable nominees.
“I love my job. I love coming to work. I rarely call in sick,” says Martinez, who's been working in the PMH chemo outpatient day ward for about 10 years — 20 in total at PMH, after graduating in 1990 from George Brown College's nursing program.
“I get to meet so many amazing patients — with different lives. You've got breast cancer to look after, you've got colon cancer patients to look after; and their lives are so interesting. And their treatment of care is different as well, and I like that, to treat different kinds of patients.”
It's a busy place. There are 15 to 18 nurses daily who take care of about 655 patients a week, most between 22 and 40 years old. There are usually three or four patients getting intravenous at a time and Martinez prepares the treatment, hooks them up to the machine, talks to them, helps them be less anxious and answers questions — “there's always a lot of multi-tasking.”
“Part of this is we try to make them as carefree as possible, not to think too much about it. The most important thing is discussing the possible drug side effects. Some of them may happen, some may not. But there are ways to avoid certain things; to avoid nausea, or to improve the immune system. So we constantly educate them each treatment.”
The first time for patients is often worrying, because of what they've heard about chemo.
Martinez recalls how Loek's big worry was the IV. “She doesn't have very good veins, so she was really scared of needles. But once it was in and she got comfortable, it was okay,” he says.
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