It’s my anniversary!

I’ve been with The Hospital for seven years this week! In honor of this momentous (to me) occasion, I bring you a reprint of something you’ve probably never read in the first place. This is from long ago when this was just a baby blog called “My Red Stapler” and I was a wee tot of 21 when the story took place. It’s about a weird thing that happened to me not long after I started working at The Hospital.

And it was an eye-opening experience….

Originally posted as:

Um, there’s a body by the elevator… anyone?

June 2006

I was only a few weeks out of orientation, working as a unit secretary. Not a lot of people actually died on the unit I worked in; if they are terminal, they know they’re terminal and they go home so they can die in peace, without us jabbing them with needles and force-feeding them green jello. Usually, the people who actually die on that floor are the ones who surprise us.

Mr. Patient wasn’t a surprise – we knew he was going, he knew he was going, and the plans were in place to discharge him the next morning with hospice. He just jumped the gun a bit. When his son came up to the desk an hour after my shift started and asked if he could see the doctor, I told him the doctors would be in soon on rounds. I had been taught from Day One that one does not interrupt the doctors in a discussion (as they were at that very moment, right behind me where Mr. Patient’s son could see them but thankfully not hear them, since they were talking about golf). He said again that he really needed the doctor to come to the room, and I explained again that the doctors would be in very soon, it was almost time for rounds, and could I get the nurse to bring him anything in the meantime?

He leaned across the desk and scowled at me. “Well,” he said loudly, “my dad just DIED and I think I need the DOCTOR to come in and pronounce him.”

Guuuhhhhh…..

The golf conversation screeched to a halt and I sat down, speechless as the doctors clamored around and looked at papers and asked questions and finally went to see the patient’s family. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing… ah yes, there, in the back of my orientation manual was the checklist. Okay…notify physician, that’s done, call spiritual care, will do, call expiration tech…

“What’s an expiration tech?” I wondered aloud.

“He’s the dude with the body bags,” said the CNA, passing by my desk. “Bags and tags.”

What a job, I thought. I called spiritual care, the expiration tech, the nursing office, the clinical manager, everyone on the list – check, check, check. Spiritual care came and consoled the family, a social worker appeared to suggest funeral arrangements – it all went on around me in a blur as I went back to the daily grind of answering the phones, processing orders and scheduling exams.

About half an hour later, admitting called. “We have a patient for room 25,” the girl said.

“Um, 25 is still…occupied.”

“You discharged Mr. Patient thirty minutes ago.”

“He died so I have to take him out of the system. But he’s still in there. The family needed some time and the expiration tech–”

“Well, I’ve got a patient in the Emergency Department who needs a bed on your unit now, and that’s the only one open. You guys need to move that guy out of there, NOW.”

Click.

I told the charge nurse, and miraculously, the family cleared out and went into a meeting room with the chaplain and the social worker while the expiration tech bagged and tagged. Or so we thought.

The orderlies rolled Mr. Patient by my desk on a stretcher with a sheet pulled over the raised rails so the outline of his body was obscured from view. Away they went on the service elevator, just as a housekeeper showed up to clean the room. The expiration tech filled out some forms for the chart, handed them to me and left as the patient from Emergency rolled past my desk and into room 25. It was perfect timing.

A few minutes later, the service elevator opened and a confused-looking orderly pushed the stretcher-with-a-sheet-over-it back in front of my desk. Mr. Patient had returned.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. “Why is HE here?”

“Uhhh,” he mumbled. “They said the tags was wrong and to bring ‘im up, so I brung him.”

He shoved a crumpled transport log in my face. I ignored it. “Who said the tags were wrong?” I demanded, looking around desperately for a charge nurse, any nurse, anyone who had been here more than three months and was better-equipped than I to deal with a body in the hallway.

“The guy in the morgue. Could you sign this? I got another trip to do.”

“You can’t just leave him here!” I wailed.

“I’ll put ‘im back in the room,” the orderly said, kicking the brake off and starting toward room 25.

“There’s a patient in there now.”

“Where’s your empty rooms?”

“We don’t have any. Please, just wait while I call the morgue and straighten this out and then you can take him–”

“I’ll put ‘im here,” he said, pushing the stretcher into an alcove by the elevators. He grabbed the transport log from me, not caring that I hadn’t signed it, and disappeared.

Breathe, I told myself. Call the morgue and tell them that the idiot orderly just left a dead man by the elevator.

“His tag was wrong,” the man in the morgue said when I called.

“What tag?”

“His toe tag. He has the wrong tag on his toe. That one goes on the bag and there’s no tag on the bag so you have to do them over before we can take him. Identification purposes. Go look at it.”

“I am NOT looking at it.”

“Better call the expiration tech.”

Click.

So I called the expiration tech. I explained the situation frantically. “You’ll come up and fix it right away?” I pleaded. “He’s in the hallway, we have no rooms–”

“Those tags are right, it’s that guy in the morgue who’s all backwards,” the tech grumbled. “Go look at the body, there’s a white tag on the toe and blue tag on the bag, right?”

“I AM NOT LOOKING AT IT!” I said again. I couldn’t, physically could not go look at Mr. Patient’s toe. I’m the newbie, the secretary for chrissake, why should I have to go look at the toe? I looked again for a nurse – WHERE were my nurses?

“Call the guy in the morgue back, tell him–”

I mustered all my meager courage. “No, YOU come up here, YOU look at the tags, and YOU call the morgue back since YOU are the expiration tech and there is a body in MY hallway.”

I slammed down the phone and a nurse finally appeared. “I need to take Mrs. Brown to CT. Is anyone using that stretcher?” she asked, pointing to the corner by the elevators.

“Mr. Patient is,” I said wearily.

“But he–”

“Came back,” I finished. “The morgue sent him back and said his tags were wrong and there was no empty room to put him in and he’s there and I called the guy and he wanted me to look at the toe but I couldn’t go look, I really couldn’t and so I told him–” I was gasping for breath and trying hard not to cry. “And Mr. Patient’s family is still in the meeting room and if they come out they’re gonna see him and I told the guy and he wanted me to look at the toe, but I couldn’t because I’ve never seen a dead body before and I couldn’t go look at the toe and–”

The nurse was wide-eyed and furious, but as she opened her mouth to curse the expiration tech to the seventh circle of hell, the elevator pinged and he reappeared. Blind to our hysteria, the tech trotted over to the stretcher, unzipped the bag and placed a white tag on the toe and a blue tag on the bag. We watched, mouths agape, as he silently pushed the stretcher onto the elevator and he and Mr. Patient disappeared just as the red-eyed family emerged from the meeting room.

Once again, it was perfect timing.

The nurse and I could do nothing but shut our mouths and tend to the living.

Hey, guys! It’s Stephany from Stephany Writes. I’m guest blogging today for Rebekah as she’s on vacay in not-so-sunny Florida. (Although I know that to most of your, 30 and 40 degree weather would feel WARM to what you’re experiencing now but to us Floridians….this. is. COLD!) Anyway, it’s my first guest blog and I’ll try to do a good job so Rebekah doesn’t hate me!

This is actually a old blog post I wrote in November 2008. It was about a month after I failed my final internship and the day I realized a lot about myself.

So, yesterday, I decided it was time to hang up my diplomas. I had a frame for my A.A. degree but was waiting to get one for my high school diploma. It’s much smaller than a regular-sized piece of paper so I needed to get the right size. And, you know, it’s been 2 1/2 years since I graduated from high school. It was time.

I framed my high school diploma just right, hammered in two nails, and made sure the diploma looked perfect. It did. So then I set to hammering two nails for the other diploma. I guess I’m not up-to-date on hammering techniques and didn’t realize that the movement of a hammer banging a nail into a wall would cause my other diploma to move and shift until it fell off the wall. The wood holding the frame together broke into 3 pieces.

I looked at it for a moment and said, “Man. That could make me cry.”

So I had a tiny, itty-bitty meltdown.

Fine. I had a huge, gulping tears “I have no purpose” cry. It felt kinda good. I’ve been holding in all my feelings for the past few weeks, pretending everything is OK. Sure, it’s fine that I failed my final internship and nobody thinks I’m ready to be alone with kids. A-OK. Hunky dory.

And I came to this realization: I don’t want to be a teacher.

I’ve had a blast in my classes. It was fun and then I got to my internship and while I adored the kids to bits and pieces, I wasn’t good at it. I rambled on and on about subjects, I never felt comfortable teaching, and honest-to-God, I never got a good evaluation.

All of my friends in their internships could whip out a lesson from scratch and have it be amazing. I would read their statuses on Facebook: “So-and-so had an AMAZING evalution, even though I had to make up a lesson from scratch.” And I was just like, “Seriously? The only way I could ever have an AMAZING evaluation is by practicing it thirty times before I did it.”

It wasn’t my path to take.

I think God needed to give me a wake-up call. Honestly, I knew teaching wasn’t where I was going to be 10 years from now. I’m a writer. I write. I love to write. I can write essays like it’s a day at the beach. I have so many ideas floating around in my brain that it’s hard to keep track. So why do teaching? I just thought it would be a good career before I got published.

Obviously, God nixed that idea.

So, I’m changing my major. I have to decide between English (emphasis on Creative Writing) or Mass Communications (emphasis on journalism or public relations). Obviously, I would want to do the first one because it would give me the best boost to become a published author. I don’t know if I want to do journalism or public relations. Journalism and public relations will probably give me a more stable job when I graduate but I already tried that with teaching. It didn’t work.

I’m going to have to take to the advisor in the College of Ed first to get the ball rolling to change my major. Then I can start talking to advisors on what to change my major to, either English or Mass Communications. I’m hoping to be able to sign up for classes for Spring but it might be too late. I hope it’s not. I need to be registered, otherwise my 6-month loan payoff period is going to kick in and I’m going to have to start making payments in June. Yikes!

I feel like I’m finally walking in God’s will now, or, at the very least, I’m headed there. I just need to keep praying that He’ll continue to direct my path. His way is a billion times better than my way – as we have seen! He’ll get me to where I need to be.

(I did end up choosing journalism over English. I’m hoping to graduate in December and I’m thinking seriously about pursuing a Master’s degree in English. But that’s all speculation. For now.)

They are just THINGS.

Just a dryer full of THINGS that caught fire at the laundromat last night.

It shouldn’t be such a big deal, I keep telling myself.

During the actual fire and the immediate aftermath, I was more mad than anything. What the heck kind of dryer catches wet clothes on fire? MY stuff! Expensive stuff! GAAAH!

So while we’re waiting for the fire department to show up, my four new friends in the laundromat and I realize a few things:

• The fire extinguisher does not work. All this time in my life I’ve wanted to try a fire extinguisher, and I get the one that’s been rotting for over 5 years.
• No one has a solid bottomed container to carry water from the laundry sink. We just have baskets. The utility closets are locked and there are no employees on duty. Not even an emergency number for a manager.

But the fire is not letting up and since the dryer where it started is attached to a whole wall of other dryers, we all figure we have to do something. Several of us dump drinks down the sink and one guy ferries the 20 oz. water bottles back and forth, fizzling the flames bit by bit. One girl empties the last of her detergent and uses the jug to douse some more flames with sudsy water.

By the time the fire department arrives, we think we have most of the flames out, but they give everything a good hosing anyway, just in case. The fire had been burning UNDER the dryer and had either gotten into or come from the electrical system, so it turns out it could have gone out of control at any minute. Goodness, says one nice fireman, didn’t you have a fire extinguisher?

I show him.

He writes down the number of the fire marshal for me, and urges me to file a complaint first thing on Monday. Major OSHA violations, big time fines, you all could have been exploded, big splort, etc.

We haul the burnt stuff out the front door to let it smolder in the snow. It was my duvet cover – my gorgeous, too-expensive duvet cover (which was entirely machine washable and dryable, natch). And my towels, my splurge-money fluffy towels with matching bathmat.

Things. A $350 load of laundry, but just things.

Until I pick away at the burnt heap in the snow, and then it ceases to be just “things.”

My favorite t-shirt. My all-time-awesome, bury-me-in-it, super mostest favorite t-shirt. 50/50, long-sleeved, white. On the front, the logo: 2000-2001 Writing Center Staff, Truman State University. And on the back, in black letters in Times New Roman, just this:

word.

That was my writing shirt.

And then I cried a little.

I have been pretty much obsessing about fires for the last 12 hours now. I cried over a t-shirt. I am pissed about three baskets’ worth of smoky laundry that I have to wash again before I leave on vacation tomorrow. I relived the other fires, the funny and the not-funny-at-all, in my head.

And while I fume and plot how I will recoup my $350, I am really just wondering, over and over, how people pull themselves together when they lose everything they have.

How can that work? How can they do it?

I can’t even begin to fathom. I’m shaken up by THIS? And people have to deal with THAT?

Memories are almost inextricably intertwined with the things we gather over the course of our lives. I wish my brain were spongy enough to absorb everything that’s ever happened to me so I didn’t need this picture of my old cat who died, or this rock from the peak of highest mountain I ever climbed, or this photo of me with my baby niece. I can still be me without those things and I can still remember all of those times, but the THINGS are a nice prompt. You can see them and smile because they can automatically remind you of something good.

Like my shirt. It said I was a writer. It might have been the only thing that made me smile when I put it on. Every. single. time.

This is why I’ll never be Zen. Things, things, things.

Blog, blog, high school, high school… we all seem to agree that there are a lot of things about the blogging community that tend to run parallel with the social hierarchy of high schools. I noted some things about that in an earlier post, but something struck me today about bullying in the blogosphere…

In real high school? Bullying could be a big problem. A serious problem that could lead to violence and even self-inflicted harm on the part of the victim. It was often met with a code of silence around the victims and helplessness from the staff who either couldn’t do something until there was a “real” problem, or brushed it off as kids being kids. Even friends and parents would say “just ignore him/her.” Often, no one would stand up for you. There were even rules in place that worked against a victim who tried to defend him/herself from a physical attack.

So bullies got away with it. They picked on people and made personal verbal attacks, which usually hurt more than any shove up against the lockers and demand for lunch money.

And sometimes there was no lunch money to give them. Sometimes you couldn’t just get up out of your desk and walk away. Sometimes you couldn’t just ignore it, so you suffered in silence and felt very, very alone.

This is where we, as a blogging community, diverge from high school.

We all write our own way and express our own opinions, and as bloggers we hold our freedom of speech and press near and dear. But we have standards in our communities, and those include respect for people and feelings as well as for opinions.

There was some buzz today about one blogger who allegedly (and I only say this because the posts are gone so I couldn’t check) posted a personal attack on another blogger, regarding the quality of her blog and its worthiness of an award she recently received. This was done in a public forum.

Other members of the blogging community came to this young woman’s defense. Whether she needed them or not, people made it clear to her – and to the person who was offending her – that she was not alone. Similar scenarios play out across the blog world every single day and prove over and over again that we stick to our principles and we have got each other’s backs against bullies and trolls.

Of course we return to free speech and our rights to express opinions. But in a public forum, especially a community forum, if you cross the line into personal attacks, do not be surprised when you start to hear from people you’ve never met or even heard of, calling you out for your treatment of another community member.

YOU will feel just how much words can hurt.

If you genuinely meant no harm and just really screwed up your wording on something and it ended up looking offensive, just make your apology and explanation. Everyone gets heated once in awhile and writes something that just comes out wrong. That’s okay. I’ve accidentally offended people through careless wording before. When genuine apologies are made and accepted, and we move on.

But you don’t accidentally tell someone their writing is pointless or that they do not deserve to be recognized for their work. And you especially do not do that on that person’s own blog or the public forum of a community to which that person belongs.

Although these things continue to happen and probably always will, I just wanted to put it out there that this is an area in which the 20-Something Bloggers community can really shine. The only people who should not be welcome (in MY opinion only) are those who make personal attacks on others, and good riddance to them if they are driven off by people who are trying to defend not only a person, but the integrity of a community.

Groups of friends and lunch tables, I see that parallel. And I think it’s a natural one. But in this aspect, it’s not high school. Bullies don’t get away with it here.

We will take care of our own.

—

(Huh. Maybe we’re actually more like a gang? Can we wear green? The 20SB website has a lot of green…)

All the lunch-table chatter about 20SB reminded me last night – I graduated from high school in 1999. I should have had a reunion by now.

WTF?! Who didn’t invite me to my own freaking  high school reunion?

I scrounged around Facebook this morning and realized that plans had never materialized for the reunion, so the class president is going to make us oh-so-cutting-edge and have an 11 year reunion for us sometime in 2010. We are SO the wave of the future.

Then, inevitably, I got back to thinking about lunch tables.

Ten and a half years ago, I was going to a pretty good-sized high school. There were about 450 people in my graduating class, and seriously – you never ate alone unless you chose to. Everyone had a lunch table. There were groups in that school, TONS of groups because there were so many of us. Everyone couldn’t be everywhere and do everything, so our natural alignments were driven by our priorities.

I was kind of middle-of-the-road, socially. I was in band and theater and so that’s where I had most of my friends. The “popular” girls were nice to me in class but we didn’t hang out or anything. They were the ones on homecoming court, student council, cheerleading, dance team, all that. But you know – those things were their priorities. I wanted to play piano. They wanted to flip about and scream really loudly at sporting events. I wanted to write a play. They wanted to play on the state-champion softball team.

A lot of those girls were truly nice people, and they didn’t dislike me – we just had our sights set on different things. I had my friends and they had theirs. Theirs ended up on homecoming court because their priority was to get them there. My friends were elected theater club and band officers and made choices on plays and performances.

I used to really want to be the tiger mascot that hopped around with the cheerleaders. I could have done it. I was energetic and you didn’t have to do a backflip in the silly costume. I was afraid that trying out would mean I wanted to be like them – and I didn’t, I really just thought it would be fun. I was at all the games with the band anyway, so why not? But I didn’t get it – not because I lost in tryouts, but because I didn’t try out at all. I didn’t make it enough of a priority to get over my fear of rejection.

I said as much to one of the nice cheerleaders who had honors English with me senior year and she said “Oh, you should have done it! You’d have been great! The girl they picked wasn’t that good, you should have at least tried out.”

Um. Oops. *mwaah mwaah mwaaaaaaah….*

It didn’t break my heart to think I had missed out on being friends with the popular girls, but it was a lesson in getting off my ass and at least trying a little harder for things I say I want.

I never sat at their lunch table. I sat with my music and theater friends. And together with a number of the cheerleaders, the dancers, and the sports stars, I got into National Honor Society, scooped up scholarships, graduated in the top 10% of my class, and went on with life somewhere else.

With 9,000 people in a community like 20SB, we can’t all be friends with everybody. We just don’t have the time. But the ones who are most visible in the community, our dancers and cheerleaders and sports stars, may shine the brightest because their priorities are those of the 20SB community. Online presence. Great communication. Reaching out and building bonds. Striving to be better writers, vloggers, techies.

When these things become your priorities in life, you can make your way to the top in a community like this.

Me? I’m not at the top. If I realigned my priorities I probably could be. I used to put more time into my blog, I used to be more visible and active in the blogging community both online and off. But as I’ve evaluated my life, I have determined that maybe I needed to step away from the glowing screen a little more. It works for me this way. This is my balance. I have blog friends who I adore, blogs by writers I don’t know but I still read, and a little bitty stake in a 20SB and Guidespot. I could do more. And I will, if I can make it fit in the balance I need in my life.

One of the popular cheerleaders quit the squad her senior year. She could have gotten a cheer scholarship. “It wasn’t for me,” she shrugged, and went on to run track instead.

Evaluate yourself. Think about why you write what you write, and where blogging fits in the priorities in your life. Are you committed to becoming a better writer? Are you committed to spending a lot of time developing communities and planning activities with people you may have never met? If you’re not – IT’S OKAY. For some people, that kind of life works and works awesomely. For you it may not. And if that means you don’t get an award, just realize – THAT’S OKAY TOO.

Are you committed to these things, committed to getting to the top and yet still feeling overlooked? This can take awhile. You don’t learn backflips and roundoffs with a full twist overnight. You must keep on.

You still have your lunch table. People still like you for who you are. And if they vote in someone else for homecoming queen, that doesn’t mean they like you any less. It’s just that they thought that in terms of real-time committment to excellence in the blogging world, they thought that someone else deserved it more.

My class homecoming queen was smart, pretty, fun, sweet, an athlete, a class council member, and active in her church. She was a busy girl who was committed to being awesome and to my knowledge never said a mean -spirited thing to anyone who hadn’t tried to grab her boobs or ass in the hall. Because she was involved in everything, everyone knew her and everyone was aware of all of her good qualities.

When you are visible, you are nominated. When you are visible and you demonstrate awesome, you win. Period. Everyone voted for Kristen, she won, and she deserved it.

Pour yourself a glass of flat champagne, put on your bent party hat, and think about this before you get mad or defensive about an award, a nomination or a lack thereof.