Say What?

The owners of Monsour Hospital were brothers. One of them was admitted with chronic back problems. His private room was beside a room with a loud confused patient who called out frequently. The moaning and yelling continued through the evening. When the night shift started, the loud vocalizations must have annoyed the doctor, because he came out of his room, took a gurney from storage, and pushed it into the noisy man’s room, then dragged the confused man onto the cart. They disappeared into an elevator. We were in a quandary. Minutes later, we got a telephone call, “one of our patients was in the middle of the main lobby on a stretcher.” His identification band said he was ours. He'd been pushed to the first floor and abandoned by the doctor. When the doctor came back to the floor, he requested medication for his back pain, then disappeared into his room. We didn’t know what to do. So we called the nursing supervisor for guidance and she reassigned the confused man to another floor.
The emergency department received a call saying we were to expect a woman being brought in by car. The family thought she might have had a stroke. I was told to wait at the emergency entrance with a wheelchair. She was to be a direct admission and I was to deliver her immediately to her room. I felt foolish standing outside waiting, but orders were orders. Ten minutes later a new powder blue convertible Cadillac whipped under the canopy. It stopped directly outside of the emergency room doors. On the side of the door white script denoted the owner’s initials. Before I could take the few steps to the car, the chauffeur jumped out of the driver’s seat and came around to open the passenger’s door. He pulled it open so I could slide the chair up to the gap. The muscular driver physically lifted the fragile-looking silver haired woman from the car seat and onto my wheelchair. The chauffeur said nothing as I whisked her away to her room. Registration came to her to admit her. There was no waiting for her in admissions. I chose not to be too inquisitive about the whole hush-hush affair when I saw as the chauffeur climbed out of the car was wearing a leather strap across one shoulder and a bulge under the opposite arm pit. I'd learned a long time ago not to question powers-that-be in administration or a large chauffeur with a bulge under his arm.