Meet Miss Copolla
A Prelude to Smooth Waters
“Miss Copolla” is the name I’ve given her out of affection and to protect her privacy-no relation to the well-known family of the same name in film.
Four feet eight inches. That was all of her.
But her voice could call an army in no time, no weight behind it needed. She didn’t have to raise it. It just carried- the way small women do sometimes, like the size of a person has nothing to do with the size of a room they can fill.
I called her Miss Copolla. Short for “a couple of minutes.”
That was her answer to everything.
How long till you’re done?
“In a couple of minutes.”
How long till you get here?
“In a couple of minutes.”
Hurry up!
“In a couple of minutes!”
Hang on a second!
“Give me a couple of minutes!”
She started and ended her stories with a couple of minutes. It was her favorite expression for all kinds of errands, all kinds of days. It meant wait. It meant I’m coming. It meant don’t rush me, I’ve got this. And once, when I needed it most, it meant something closer to a blessing.
Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.
“In a couple of minutes.”
I met her in my early nanny days here in America. I was a nanny first, before I became a nurse- reviewing for my state boards, single, and not knowing a single soul in this country. My introduction to American life started very humbly. Three little ones and a tiny woman with a big voice were the first people who made a stranger’s country feel like it might, eventually, be mine.
She had three kids of her own, all of whom adored her. Caring, for her, was a given- no pressure beyond the basic job of it. Take care of the little ones. Do it honestly. Get paid fairly at the end of the day. That was the whole arrangement. Nothing more was of her, and she had never asked for more than that in return.
She is retired now. But she never really left. She has become an extension of the family she cared for. The kids are grown, with families of their own, and they still call her, still visit her on special occasions, still count her as theirs. That is what real caring does. It doesn’t end when the job does.
She made my stay in America bearable in those first few years. I did not have any family here yet. I had her.
Through her eyes, I saw caring in its most basic form. Just being a nice human being. Taking care of the basic. Most of us have forgotten how a simple upbringing - humor, hard work, integrity - can mold a child to deal with life’s imperfections. We have made caring complicated. She never did.
Caring is powerful that way. it builds you into something great. And its absence -slow, quiet, unannounced - feeds you seeds of mistrust instead, until it becomes an unhealthy mindset that, left long enough, self-destructs.
I did not know it then, in those early years, humble and unmoored. But Miss Copolla was giving me something i would spend the rest of my career trying to give back - to patients, to family, to strangers on their worst days.
She just needed a couple of minutes.
Turns out, that was enough to last a lifetime.
I think about her now, on the floor, in a job she never had to do.
Because nursing today is not measured in a couple of minutes anymore. It is measured in minutes, period. Counted, time-stamped, entered into a field. How long to start an IV. How long to draw the labs, admit the patient, discharge the patient. How long did it take to give the meds. Twelve hours, sliced into intervals, and every intervals belongs to the paper, not the person.
Caring itself, gets the yellow flag. Not because it didn’t happen- because it can’t be proven the way the rest can. We say we care for you by doing this. By clicking the box, by charting the vitals, by finishing the note before the next one starts. Care gets pushed back to make room for more to document. The actual sitting with someone, the actual caring - that has no field of its own. There is nowhere to enter it.
And if the sick gets better, count it lucky. She did her job. As if getting better were the paperwork’s doing, and not the years of instinct nobody put in a box.
I keep asking myself what nursing will look like in the years ahead, if this keeps being the shape of it. Whether there is a future where a nurse can still be Miss Copolla to somebody- no pressure beyond the basic, honest work of taking care of another person- instead of a nurse being asked to prove, that the caring even happened at all.
Lately, I have started to wonder if the answer might be a strange one. Not a person this time, but a machine - the same technology that has, in many ways, made things harder for us on the floor. I did not expect to look for hope there. But i have started to see glimpses of it. Nurses, decades into their careers, being handed tools built with them instead of for them, told that hand back the very thing Miss Copolla gave freely - time, and the room to actually care.
I do not know yet if the water gets any smoother.
But if you’ll give me a couple of minutes each Saturday, I’d like to find out with you.