As a kid, Dan Souza finds it hard to appreciate his mother’s nursing expertise until he sees it in action after a series of fateful incidents.

Dan Souza is Editor in Chief of Cook’s Illustrated and a cast member of the Emmy-Award Winning television show America’s Test Kitchen. Dan is the kitchen editor of the New York Times bestseller “The Science of Good Cooking” (2012) and James Beard Award-nominated “Cook’s Science” (2016). He is a regular contributor to The Splendid Table radio program, and his personal stories have been featured on the Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour. After graduating first in his class from the Culinary Institute of America, Dan cooked in restaurants in Boston, New York, and Hungary before finding his true calling: helping home cooks succeed in the kitchen.

This story originally aired on Nov. 23, 2018, in an episode titled “Parents“.

Story Transcript

My mom is an incredible cook.  Really, really great cook.  But she's also a nurse.  That might not sound like a contradiction but just stick with me. 

Growing up, my mom would work really long hours at the hospital.  She’d come home and she was kind of an every woman, so she would also make dinner for us, for my dad, my sister and I.  We’d sit down like I think a lot of families do, pretty much every night sit down to really, really great food. 

She’d cook all kinds of things, really comforting stuff.  My favorite was probably her Maine Clam Chowder.  Just absolutely simple but delicious. 

So we’d sit down to eat and we would just kind of go over our day.  So my sister and I would talk about school.  My dad would bore everyone with some stories from the office.  And then it would be my mom’s turn.  She would just kind of talk about what she had been going through that day. 

So there was the 300-pound guy that got out of surgery and was in his bed and felt like he was strong enough and healthy enough to get out of bed by himself.  So just get up and then really, really bad fall.  So tons of bruising, loads of internal bleeding, really bad situation. 

Or there was the woman who had to go into surgery and she had to be intubated, which means to put a breathing tube down the throat.  For a variety of really interesting reasons, she couldn’t have it go down her throat so she had to be a nasal intubation, which is a really cool technique that my mom just didn’t get a chance to do very often so it’s kind of a cool experience for her. 

Or there was the woman who had a really bad wound that just refused to heal.  And that required maggot therapy.  So just a quick primer on how that works, what you do is your first step is to order the maggots from the lab.  So you don’t just use any maggots.  You use clean maggots from the lab. 

But then you got to put them on the wound.  So you put them on the wound then you got to put their dressing on.  There’s two things that the dressing needs to do.  The first is it has to be breathable.  You don’t want to kill the maggots.  The second thing is it needs to seal really tightly because you don’t want the maggots getting out. 

Anyway, you put the dressing on, you send the patient home for forty-eight hours.  During that forty-eight hours they go to work, they could eat, they could sleep with the maggots on them.  Forty-eight hours later they come in.  What’s really cool is during that time the maggots have eaten all the dead flesh.  That’s actually what’s so neat about it.  They don’t eat the live flesh so it’s pretty painless. 

Anyway, so they come in, you take the dressing off and at that point they've grown eight times larger than when you put them on.  You get rid of the maggots. 

So at this point in the dinner, my mom she’d be eating and talking and she’d sense a change in the room.  There wasn’t a sound of like silverware on bowls.  There were no signs of active listening.  There wasn’t “Uh-huh,” “Oh, really,” “You don’t say.”  So she’d look up and she would see three just ghost-white, completely blank faces staring back at her. 

I would look at her and I would look down at my soup and I would think, “You know, it doesn’t matter how good of a cook you are.  Your nursing ruins everything.” 

The thing is it didn’t just happen to the immediate inner family.  This spread out.  I remember as a kid running around outside with a bunch of friends and my mom would call us in to have some lemonade or iced tea.  We’d sit down at the table and we’d be kind of drinking and hanging out and she would just reach over to my friend’s arm and give it a slight turn. 

She’d be like, “Ooh, look at that vein.  I could easily get a needle and IV in that anytime.  That’s a great vein.” 

My friend would just look over me completely shocked and I would just try to melt into my seat and disappear.  I mean, she stalked our house with surgical grade shears, Band-Aids, gauze, stuff to make a cast.  She had the entire place stacked with hospital stuff.  I’m pretty sure that ten wounded union soldiers could have shown up at the house.  We could have kept them alive for a month on just what she had in the bathroom cabinet. 

She banned the terms ‘crap,” “poop” and “number two.”  If you were sitting down to go to the bathroom, you were having a bowel movement.  BM if you want to be really casual. 

So this was like the nurse-level living.  And moms leave notes around the house a lot.  They put them in your lunch, they leave them everywhere.  So many medical abbreviations and just straight-up Latin.  They're like no one could read them. 

I grew up, I spent a lot of my time not really appreciating that my mom was a nurse and a lot of times being grossed out and not really wanting to be around it, but that all changed when I was about twelve years old. 

My sister and I had some friends and we were outside playing in the yard.  For a reason that we’ll never know, my dad, who has kind of a ride-on tractor lawnmower thing, was letting us use it and drive it around.  One of my sister’s friends was driving and one of my friends was doing this really fun thing where you kind of like it’s like a slow-speed accident waiting to happen and you're just kind of out in front of it like, “Don’t hit me.  Don’t hit me.”  The funny thing is that she hit him. 

So the front wheels rolled over his body and then at that point she realized something wasn’t right and so she took her foot off the throttle.  So the tractor is just sitting on top of my friend and it is just mayhem.  You have like twelve little kids screaming and crying and pointing.  No one is really handling the situation very well. 

My mom comes out of the house and she triages the shit out of the situation.  “So kids, get away.  You, call 911.  You, two strong neighbors, come over here.  Lift the tractor at these two points.  Pick it up.” 

My friend is about to start moving.  She jumps on him, tractions the legs, stabilizes it.  The EMTs arrive.  She briefs the EMTs on the situation, pack him up on the stretcher, she's in the ambulance, gone.  And she just leaves behind the scene of like tear-stained cheeks and trembling kids in her wake.  And I was like, “Huh, okay.  Having a mom as a nurse is a pretty cool thing.” 

Then there was the time that I had to have penis surgery.  Yeah.  So quick primer on how that works, most penises have an arrow-straight urethra.  That’s where the pee comes out.  Mine had this really funny little difference where at the end where it should be straight, it just curves down.  Just a tiny little difference. 

It actually makes a really big difference, though.  Basically, I'd stand up to go to the bathroom and aim right at that toilet bowl but it would just shoot right at my feet.  I got a little bit of a prank penis situation, which is really fine.  So I had to get that fixed.  

My mom was with me from the moment I started this process to the time that I was fully healed.  And penis surgery is painful.  You might not have guessed. 

So I went into the hospital.  First, I was young so I had a consultation and they let me pick out the smell of the anesthesia that I was going to have.  Then I had to go in for the surgery and she was with me right until I went into the operating room.  On the other end, she was there when I got out. 

The amazing thing about having a mom as a nurse in a hospital is she knows… I mean, this was her hospital so she knows all the other nurses.  She knows the doctor.  She can get things done whenever it needs to be done.  So she was with me the whole time. 

She was even instrumental when we got home.  She worked with my dad on this ingenious device.  It’s really painful to have a bunch of blankets on this area after you've had penis surgery so she and my dad designed this basically paint bucket cut in half that made a nice arch that I could put over there for when I slept.  So it really did pay to have a nurse in that case. 

Anyway, my mom nowadays she's not nursing professionally anymore.  She's retired.  Then it’s kind of like awkward twist of how life works, she's going to the hospital a lot more than she used to but because she's older, because she needs to go there. 

So she recently went in.  She had to get a knee surgery which, on a scale of surgeries, is not penis surgery but it’s painful.  It’s very painful. 

So there's this thing with my mom that really sucks as she can’t take opioids.  She can’t take those really powerful pain meds that most people rely on after they have a surgery, but she had to get it done. 

So she went in and had the surgery.  She went through it and they give you this nerve block when you go in for the surgery so it basically cuts out all feeling in your leg.  That wears off after maybe twelve hours then the pain sets in.  That’s usually when you take Percocet and Vicodin, all these strong drugs.  And she went to just Advil. 

So I went in to visit her after she was kind of awake and everything in the hospital.  She only let me stay for five minutes then she told me to leave.  For anyone who knows my mom, that’s not like her.  She's the warmest person and wants people around.  But I got to see in her eyes that she was in so much pain.

And I could tell that she was a little bit scared too because this was just the beginning.  She had to heal a lot in the hospital and then go home and do a lot of physical therapy.  She had to get her knee from just bending ninety degrees, which wasn’t too bad, all the way to 120 degrees, which is what you need for normal function.  You're really just grinding away at it until that works. 

So she was in the hospital for a few more days.  I went to visit her every time and it was again, “Five minutes, you got to go.” 

Eventually she went home and she continued the physical therapy on her own on the Advil.  She finally went into this outpatient center to do this checkup to kind of check her progress and she is the hero of this outpatient center.  She's now the poster child for how to recover from surgery.  The doctors are like, anyone who comes in from now on if they're like, “I need more pain medicine,” “I can’t do my PT,” she's like here is Marty Souza and she is seventy years old and she did it on Advil.  So I’m not surprised.  She's an incredibly tough person. 

But anyway, she's healed now.  It’s really, really great to have her back.  We were home recently for Easter dinner and she's cooking and she's taking care of everyone, running around on this new knee and it’s so great. 

So we sit down to dinner and it just feels like when we were kids and everyone is kind of like catching up on what’s going on, and my dad’s talking about stuff, and my sister is catching us up on her kids.  Then Marty is kind of just talking about things with her knee and then she lets us know that the rate of death when it comes to flesh-eating bacteria jumps to about 75% when the scrotum is involved.  And I couldn’t be happier about it.  Thanks.