So the funniest thing happened at work…

It occurs to me that I have a preponderance of whiny negative stories about work, so it seems only natural that I should highlight some of the funny things that happen at my hospital. Funny, you say? At a hospital, you say? But of course, there’s nothing funnier than sick people sometimes, after all they are a bit prone to exaggeration.

• I walked in on a patient and one of his visitors screaming at each other. The basis of the argument was that they had both had surgery at one point and both had died (briefly) on the table. My patient swore he saw a bright light and felt no fear, while his friend swore that there was nothing when he died. The debate (can you even call it that) eventually degenerated into,

“There is!”

“There isn’t!”

“I saw it!”

“You didn’t!”

and I was forced to escort the agitated non-believer out of the room.

• One of the nurses told me that two elderly gentlemen, roommates, weren’t getting along, and we were going to move them to separate rooms. So both of us entered the room to find the two old (and I mean old) men slowly (and I mean slowly) working their way across the room towards each other. The guy in the second bed was hobbling along with his cane, while the gent in bed one was surfing from one piece of furniture to the next in an attempt to cross the room. So the two of us are watching this scene VERY slowly unfold before of us, as these two very old “broken hips waiting to happen” cruise towards each other yelling racial epitaphs at each other. Basically our solution was to place a couple of chairs in between the two of them, this proving to be too much of an obstacle for either of them to maneuver around, and once the guys wore themselves out yelling at each other and had to sit down, we just slid a wheelchair in behind the first guy and rolled him out of the room. He was asleep before we made down the hall.

• This one actually happened just a couple of days ago. The rehab unit gets a pretty steady stream of student nurses. So a new batch showed up for their second day interacting with patients, EVER . Now when the instructor is dividing up patients they try to figure out which students, if any, have nursing assistant backgrounds, figuring they can handle a couple of patients. This particular group didn’t have any, so this huddle of students came trailing along behind me and the other tech as we tried to finish up our work, peppering us with questions. Here are some of the highlights:

1. “So I knock on the door and then enter, right?”
2. “Can I touch him?”
3. The follow up to question 2 was the student standing three feet away from the bed and bowing at the waist to get close enough to see an incision.
4. “MAY I turn on the lights?”
5. “Do your lights have switches?”
6. “Is your patient nice? (with lower lip quiver)”
7. Standing in the hall, watching the patient watching TV, “I’d hate to bother them.”
8. “Have you seen my stethoscope?”
9. “Do you smell that? What is that?” Actually, I heard this one thrice.
10. A student standing in the hall with both palms extended away from him, mouthing “left”, “right”, and nodding.

So there you go. It ain’t all gloom and doom at hospitals. Frankly those nursing student made my day. They were quite possibly the cutest damn thing I’d seen in a while.

Later.