Halloween Hands

One Halloween, Dr. Vandyk was on duty in the emergency room when a young man came in with both of his hands injured. It was one of the Flinn boys. For some reason Dr. Vandyke had always called the brothers “The Flying Flinns.”

We quite frequently saw the Flinn boys for various injuries. It wasn’t that they were abused, but accidents just seemed to seek them out and find them. They looked a lot like peas in a pod, except they weren’t green. Each one had sandy, red hair and a wide scattering of freckles spread over their cheeks.

When we looked at the Flinn boy’s hands and they were abraded, bruised, and generally mutilated. The doctor ordered x-rays. While we were cleaning both of his hands and waiting for the x-ray tech, he began to share his tale.

“I was working at a haunted house tonight. I had huge rubber feet, rubber hands and a big, bushy wig that partially covered my face.”

We could see that the clothing he was wearing were old and tattered with red paint smeared on them to simulate blood.

“Two gay guys came into the maze of the house. All of us tried our hardest to really scare them.  I could hear them coming closer down the darkened hallway. The one was saying, ‘Oh, Frankie! I’m so scared! Frankie, hold me, I’m so scared!’ and I thought, ‘Here’s where I get them.’ Just as they reached the doorway to come into my room, I slapped both of my hands on the door frame and howled as loud as I could. I heard an ‘OH, FRANKIE!!’ and the guy slammed the door on my fingers. Now, I really did scream. I had a reason to yell. My hollering must have scared them, because they ran through my room and disappeared into the darkness beyond. Now, I’m here to see whether or not they broke my fingers.

When the x-ray films came back, He only had a small non-displaced fracture that we dressed his wounds, splinted the finger, and sent him home. It took all we could do to keep from laughing while we were treating him. The Flinn kid was obviously in pain, but what a story he can tell his grandkids.

The Christmas Candies

He smiled as he lifted the old candy box down from the top closet shelf. It was worn from many years of being handled. He remembered the year when he and his wife had gotten the box of assorted chocolates as a Christmas gift. The candy was long gone, but the box had gained a second purpose of collecting buttons, thread, needles, and a variety of other accumulated odds and ends.

I flipped open its broad yellow and white hinged top. A faint aroma of the chocolate wafted up and stirred the memories lodged in my nostrils. It took me back to an almost embarrassing incident that makes me smile now. My wife was still alive and our three children’s ages ranged from four or five years old to twelve years old.

My wife had invited some of our old friends over for a post-Christmas celebration. It was to be a time for talking, snacking, and exchanging of gifts. Those friends had three children of their own and it made a perfect fit for our friendship and for exchanging of gifts.

My wife had prepared a tray of vegetables and dip, a tray of crackers with a cheese ball, and a tray of assorted cookies to serve our guests. As she showered and got dressed, I set the trays of goodies out on the dining room table. It looked festive, but I thought the cookie tray looked a little plain and would look more celebratory with a few of the chocolates scattered on the tray. I pulled the candy box from its spot under the Christmas tree. I opened it up and lifted the first piece of chocolate from its resting place inside. It was still cradled in its crinkled brown paper cup.

The aroma and the sight of the confection made my mouth water. I hadn’t eaten one of the chocolates yet and it tempted me. I was feeling a bit hungry and seeing all of the food on the table and thought I would try a piece now. As I took the candy out of its paper wrapper, I thought that it felt a bit odd. Turning it over, I had a surprise. I could see that one of our kids had picked the chocolate coating off the underside. Apparently the child hadn’t liked the crème that had been hidden inside and returned it to its brown crinkled paper cup and then slipped it back into box, making it look as if it had never been disturbed.

I ate the disfigured piece of chocolate even though I could see that the crème inside wasn’t my one of my favorites. The frugal nature in me rejected the other option of throwing it away. The waste of food would have grated on my upbringing.

I picked out a second piece of candy nestled in its paper nest to put onto the tray. This one felt odd too. When I turned it over, it had the bottom coating of sweets scraped off as well. The chocolate layer was gone and the creamy filling was exposed.

I looked through the candies. All of the chocolates had been mutilated, rendered bottomless, and returned to their candy box homes. That evening none of the sweet confections ever made it onto the cookie tray. Completely by accident, I had discovered and avoided an embarrassing situation.

Even if I hadn’t caught the mutilated bonbon, our friends would have understood. They had three children too. It has become an amusing story in our family and someone will ask, “Anyone want a piece of chocolate?”

The Christmas Pie

Between the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas falls the deer hunting season in our state of Pennsylvania. The first day of buck hunting is a holiday for the school kids who want to join in the hunt. My mother-in-law had always relied on someone in the family to harvest a deer so she could claim some of the fat, tallow, and bits of the venison flesh to make the filling for her mince meat pies. She would bake the meat pies for the Christmas holiday meals. She would occasionally use beef products to make the filling for her pies if there wasn’t any venison available, but that was something she would do only reluctantly.

Usually my brother or I would get either a buck or a doe or both. We frequently hunted together with our father and usually managed to bring down at least one deer and quite often more than one among the three of us. We didn’t allow any of the deer meat to go to waste and we would harvest as many deer as we had licenses. We liked the flavor of venison.

After we would spend hours in the outdoors hunting in all kinds of weather to find and to kill a deer, we didn’t really want to turn our hard-earned prize over to a butcher who might or might not salvage all of the meat from the carcass for us. We had heard stories about unscrupulous butchers and we were worried that all of the meat from our deer might not be returned, the meat might not be handled properly, or we might not get the meat from the deer that we had turned in to the butcher to be returned to us. We also did not like the fact that butchers used band saws to cut through the brittle deer bones splintering them and leaving slivers of bone in the meat.

When we were younger, we helped our uncles and our grandfather to butcher several hogs and a young bull at granddad’s farm every year. We had learned the basic skills for cutting up meat and it was only a small step from that to actually doing the butchering for ourselves. Our father had a garage/ shed at the back of his property. We would skin the deer and allow it to hang inside to cool before quartering the deer and eventually dividing and slicing the meat into the desired cuts.

If we found a stray hair we knew who to blame. Our cuts of meat may not have been as fancy or as perfect as those that a professional butcher could do, but we would first cut around the bones and remove them before slicing the meat. What was left for us to cut was all meat.

My brother liked to divide his deer to make steaks, deer sausage, and cold pack the smaller non-descript pieces of venison. I liked to cut my deer into steaks, cold pack the smaller pieces, and make deer jerky. Usually I could collect enough meat and fat from the rib cages to give my mother-in-law enough meat to make at least two mince meat pies and often more.

Following a recipe that she had used for years she would mix the raisins, currants, apples, citrus products, and spices together. Once they had cooked, she would put the mixture into glass jars and store them in the refrigerator until the filling was needed for the making of her pies.

It would be only one of the flavors of pie that she would bake for Christmas.

Plop, Plop, Fizz. Fizz, Oh What a Relief It Is

It was an unusually busy three to eleven shift on our med/ surg. floor. Everyone was “flying solo.” As long as they could do a task without asking for help, they did it. Everyone was trying to get “their own work” done, without pulling someone else away another from their assignments.

The call bell rang out and one of our R. N. s, Barb was at the desk and answered the call light. It was that old man who said “I really need to go bad!”

It’s almost always a better choice to help a patient to the bathroom than to change the bed linens, although there are always exceptions.

Barb was wearing a brand new pant uniform and shoes. She almost glowed like an angel under the fluorescent lights. She was the only nurse at the station. She stopped taking off the doctors’ orders and hurried into the patient’s room.

The man was thin, with wispy white hair, and unsteady on his feet. Barb helped him to stand. She then stepped behind him to help him keep balanced. She placed a hand beneath each of his armpits, to support him as he walked to the bathroom. After a few steps, Barb found herself in a dilemma. The old man began to move his bowels. Like a cow, his feces was loose and it dropped, “PLOP! PLOP!” on the floor, splattering Barb’s new shoes and pant legs.

Barb couldn’t allow the unsteady, elderly patient to walk unaided, but she didn’t want the poop to continue splashing onto her new clothing. All she could do was to hold onto him and keep going. She kept spreading her legs wider and wider to try to avoid stepping in the feces and to keep her uniform from being splattered.

By the time she made it to the bathroom entrance, her stance was almost too wide to go through the bathroom door. She eased the man through the doorway and sat him on the commode. Leaving him with the call bell cord, she exited the bathroom, cleaned the mess on the floor, and went to the nurse’s lounge to wipe off the worst of the feces from her shoes and pants. She couldn’t remove enough of the feces from her new pants and had to wear a pairs of operating room scrub pants and soak her pants in cold water.

For most of the evening, she was upset, but after a few of us moving past her with our arms out in front of us and walking with our legs spread wide, she did see the humor of the whole incident and managed to smile before the end of her shift.

Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town

A middle aged woman, who looked much older, had her eye on Kurt. She was enamored with him. When he was on duty, she would ring her call bell more frequently than usual to get him to come into her room. When she would hear his footsteps, she would throw back her sheets and pull up her patient gown, exposing her private parts for him to see.

Kurt would walk to the bedside and pull the gown back into place and the sheets back over her, then ask. “Ruby, what do you need?”

It was always some small thing that she wanted. Like “Can you move my table closer?” “Can you get me fresh water?” “Would you empty my bedpan?” or “Would you move my telephone closer.”

Kurt managed to keep his composure and be polite for quite some time. He ignored her obvious sexual advances. Kurt was married. For awhile Kurt was actually behaving himself. He tried to ignore the problem until it became obvious he needed to do something before a sexual accusation actually occurred.

 

One evening he came into her room more quickly than she expected. He caught Ruby flipping off the sheets and pulling up the hem of her patient gown above her waist. This was the final straw. Kurt stopped, bent over and looked across the bottom of the bed, and up between her legs. He announced, “Ruby, you have scabs!”

It shocked her so much that she jerked the sheets over her exposed body and covering herself. She said to Karl, “Never mind.”

Kurt left the room with a smile on his face and Ruby’s calls for assistance became less and less frequent.

Prince Charles

When I was gathering information in the triage area from Prince Charles, He said something that has always irritated me. I cannot for the life of me, understand why people like him who never work always make the same statement, he asked, “Are you hard at work or hardly working?” then he chuckled, thinking himself the most original, witty,  and amusing man in the world.

Let me say this, a person like him irritates me to no end. Not only do they not work, but they have no respect for those who do. I think that at one time he saw what work was, didn’t like it, and went on public assistance to avoid it.

That day, I did manage to restrain myself from playing “Kick the Can” with the Prince Charles, but I was still seething when I took him inside to be treated.

 

Several days later, I had volunteered to pass out surplus food to the “needy.” I was talking to another volunteer at our volunteer fire department and shared my “conversation” with Prince Charles from a few days earlier. He laughed when I told him “I just wanted to punch the Prince in the mouth.”

The doors opened and holding out a paper sack, the very first, toothless, dirty, male recipient commented as he took his place in line, “Are you guys hard at work or hardly working?” and of course he chuckled.

I felt like hitting him in the head with the five pound block of cheese or feed it to him in one quick thrust or maybe I could force the block of cheese up into his other end. These evil thoughts burst out of my mind, as I gritted my teeth. I paused, took a deep breath, and handed him the cheese. When I glanced to my side at my fellow volunteer, coworker, of course I saw his whole body shaking with silent laughter.

I tried to hand the freeloader the surplus, but he couldn’t even take the cheese from my hand, he held out his sack for me to put the cheese inside. Apparently even reaching for and taking the cheese from me to place it in the bag for himself constituted work and was too much exertion for him.

Coffee Anyone?

One physician, not one of the emergency room doctors, would often have his office patients report to the emergency department for him to see. He would order the testing that he thought needed to be done. Without any inconvenience to him, he could extend his office hours on the backs of the emergency room’s nursing staff. There was no policy to prevent him from doing so.

We would have to make a chart for each patient, do their assessments, disrobe them, gown them, and take the patient’s vital signs. Once the person was settled in one of the beds, we would call the doctor for orders. When he thought the results would be back, he’d stroll over to see the patients. Usually we would have two or three beds tied up for just his clients until he finished rounding in the hospital and came to see them.

Eventually, he got tired of answering our telephone calls as each patient would arrive. He knew how many patients he had advised to come and meet him at the hospital. He would make us wait until he thought that they had all arrived before he would return our calls. We would then have fill out the needed requisitions for the ordered tests and wait for the results to come back. All the while, our beds were being tied up with his patients, waiting for him to come and to see them. Once the all of results were back, we would again have to page him and he would eventually decide to stroll over to see his patients.

We heard through the grapevine, that each morning, he liked to grab a cup of coffee and talk with the radiologists before he visited his in-patients, so we started to call x-ray to see if they could prod him into answering our pages.

This worked well for awhile until one day someone called the radiology department and asked if the doctor was there. Apparently he had told the technicians and the secretaries not to interrupt him or even tell us whether he was in the hospital or not. He obviously didn’t want bothered until HE was ready.

He was married, but it was also rumored that he had a girlfriend on the side who worked in the radiology department as well. Do you think it was a coincidence?

It was a very busy morning and we had four of his patients filling our beds. The emergency department had a total of eight beds at the time. We were trying to work around his patients and take care of those arriving for emergency treatment. The limited number of beds that we had available hampered us and made our jobs so much more difficult. Of course, this was one of the days he refused to answer his pages.

I got frustrated at his lack of concern for his patients and for the emergency room in general. I felt the devil crawl out of me and climb up onto my shoulder. I snatched up the telephone and dialed x-ray.

“This is the x-ray department. How may I help you?” a female voice demurely chimed.

I said, “This is Tom from the emergency room. Would doctor Malden happen to be there enjoying a cup of coffee and a honey bun?”

Now a honey bun could have been one of those sweet, sticky, swirled pastries or….?  Well you get the idea.

I heard a small gasp on the other end of the phone and then a soft chuckle before the super sweet voice said, “Hold on, I’ll check for you.”

Dr. Malden returned my telephone call shortly thereafter. I don’t know if she ever told the doctor or his honey bun what I had said, but when I called the x-ray department from then on, someone would always check to see if he was there. They would do it for me and no one else. I guess my “innocent” comment had gotten passed along to her fellow employees.