Warning: NSFWS. (Not Safe for Weak Stomachs)
I have a thing for hospitals. Some of you know this already. I get a little buzz of excitement when I get within a 100 ft of one. I love how they smell. I never get tired of trying to figure out the patients. I could sit there all day and watch people pass through. So yesterday when I went in for an x-ray of my leg (no worries everything is fine), you can imagine that I enjoyed the 30 minute wait more than most. This all goes back to a few facts: My mom is a nurse. One of my favorite toys as a child was a Fisher-Price Hospital. And the best job I'll ever have was at my hometown hospital when I was in college. I learned more in that hospital than any college class or job I've had since. And I was 19. I was hired to transport patients around the hospital and was based in the emergency room. I worked days. I worked nights. I would have worked 24 hours a day if they would have let me. I should say at this point that my mom used to work in this hospital full time, and I was born there. She also was working there part-time during thattime to pay for my college tuition. So for the first few weeks, I was introduced as Lou Ann's son, which then meant the follow up question was "Are you one of the twins?" No.
The next thing you need to know is that I was the only 19 year-old guy working in the hospital. No one had ever had the job I had, and the nurses
had no idea what to do with me.
day, Kathy needed me to disconnect an IV. When I asked for help, she said "Oh it's easy. Watch." The same thing happened when I learned to give a bed bath. And once Dr. Barker gave me an in-depth lesson on setting a cast. Pretty soon I spent my day working all over the hospital. Some days it was in ER, Day Surgery, Recovery Room and even once in ICU. The best part was greeting the patients when they arrived in the ER. I should say now that the majority of the people that came to the ER were not
there for emergencies. A lot did not have insurance or any permanent physician. Others were drug seekers. And as one nurse I worked with put,
"Just Spam Sucking Trailer Trash." Scrubs clothes earned me a lot of respect. Most people thought I was a medical student and ended up telling me more than I ever needed to know. I remember one dude coming up to the window and rather than tell the nurse what was wrong him, he wanted to talk to me. In private. So after some discussion, I reported back to the nurse. "Doris, this guy says he has the drip." I had no idea what he meant. I learned later he had a venereal disease. I saw a couple of drug overdoses, and let me tell you that pumping someone's stomach is not pleasant. But everyone walked away in a better place. One Saturday afternoon, I heard a truck horn blowing. I ran out with a wheelchair and a lady collapsed in my arms. She was covered in blood and
pretty soon so was I. No one knew her name. She had no ID.She had dropped a piece of glass on her arm at the local lumber yard A stranger rescued her in the parking lot and drove her to the hospital. After a few hours, she was all sewn up. We found her family, and she was on her way home.
I remember a young police officer collapsing from a brain aneurysm. I stood behind his wife as the helicopter lifted off to transport him to Dallas - watching her waive good bye to her husband is etched in my memory. He did not make it. There were other deaths, and I will tell you that was always difficult.
But I won't end on a sad note because there are too many funny stories for me to tell. In addition to the real emergencies, and the drug seekers, the riff-raff, the inmates (it was a county hospital), you also have the nursing home population. As a general rule, nursing home administrators do not want people to die there, so they always bring the patients to the hospital for the littlest things.
One old man (I mean no disrespect, but he WAS old), came in on a Saturday afternoon. ER's are always really busy on Saturdays. I can't remember his chief complaint. But it was time to discharge him and someone from his family came to pick him up. We desperately needed the room he was in. Doris asked me to get a wheelchair and help him to the car. He fumbled around getting into the chair, and he told me that he needed to go to the bathroom. Damn. For a moment I considered ignoring him. I knew he had on an adult diaper. But I couldn't ignore him. I wheeled him to the ER bathroom. It was locked. Damn. We waited a minute. He said he really had to go. Damn. Still locked. He told me again he really had to go, so I took him out of the ER down the hall to the public bathroom. I helped him stand up and get into position. I thought he had to pee. I was wrong. About that time he pooped. And I mean he pooped everywhere. The diaper was full. It was running down his leg. And all I had was what every public bathroom has. I ran back to the ER. I grabbed towels, gloves, a gown and I went back to rescue the old man. People started banging on the door. My beeper was going off. The operator was paging me on the overheard speaker. And keep in mind that it's me, the old man, and a wheel chair in this bathroom. And he wasn't helpful. So just think about it. Where do you start? The man never said a word. I got him cleaned up. I wheeled him outside and wished him well. I got back to the ER and Doris said, "Where have you been?" "Doris, you don't want to know." And my last story. (I apologize for this long post.) So another part of my job was to keep the ER log book up-to-date. I entered all patients, theirchief complaint, diagnosis and discharge date.
I learned lots of hospital abbreviations and codes. UTI (Urinary Tract Infection). URI (Upper Respiratory Infection). PG (Pregnant). COPD (Chronic Obstructie Pulmonary Disease). NKDA (No Known Drug Allergies).
It was a quiet afternoon. No patients. And when Doris didn't have patients, she smoked, drank coffee and worked on crossword puzzles. I said "Doris, what's PID?" She laughed, but never looked up. "Josh, that's Pussy in Distress." Or better known as pelvic inflammatory disease.