Hey Sweets
I was working the night shift on a medical/surgical floor at Frick Hospital in Mt/ Pleasant, Pennsylvania. There was one rotund middle-aged man who was a bit off. His elevator wasn’t riding to the top floor. Sometimes it seemed that his brain travelled from side to side instead of up and down. He spoke with a slur and reminded me of a shorter, warped Uncle Fester from “The Addams Family.” I’ll give the man the name of John and I don’t know if this fact had any bearing on John’s unusual behavior or not, but he frequently bragged that his mother was a bus driver.
He was in and out of the hospital for multiple problems, but several things remained constant. He always had busy hands under the sheets. We never asked him what he was doing. No one really wanted to know. He always had several pieces of cellophane wrapped candy in a little pile on the sheet beside his leg. John would make the offer to help yourself to a piece. However, it was always to the women that entered his room. He’d say, “Thay thweeth, take a pieth of candy.”
Then he’d ask the person for a favor. “Thay Thweeth, how’th about a cup of coffee.”
Sometime among his frequent stays, he had a colostomy. A colostomy is formed by surgery to make an opening in the stomach wall and attach a loop of bowel to the outside so that feces will exit the body there instead of through the normal route through the rectum. A bag is placed over the stoma opening to catch the stool. To make part of the seal leak-proof, an application of aluminum paste was necessary. The application and the paste itself was just as messy as it sounds. The silver metal-colored paste was thick and many times was applied with a tongue depressor, like spreading butter on toast with a butter knife. The paste and extra colostomy supplies were kept at the patient’s bedside when they were needed to make the changes quickly.
Making our rounds one night we entered his room and found him completely naked. A naked patient was no big deal. It was something we often encountered. What made him remarkable was that he’d spread the thick aluminum paste from neck to knees, saying, “I’m an airplane. I’m an airplane.” It was a major task removing the paste. He had to be scraped, before we could wash it off. He looked like a silver-skinned alien from outer space. I can remember his bulging abdomen shining silver in the overhead light to look like a silver balloon.