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.

(You know you love that title song. Britney, your abs inspire me.)

It’s so easy to only see the short-term when you’re looking forward. But what about when you’re looking back?

I have been so tired lately. Physically tired, mostly – sometimes I just lay in my bed with my brain on, on on… writing the novel or a school assignment or a blog post in my head but so exhausted that Iwon’t even get up to sit at my computer and put words on a screen.

So this week, I blamed it on the post-vacation slump.

Then I thought about it and realized I’ve felt this way for a long time.

Last week I just thought I was relaxing.

The week before I blamed the pre-vacation madness of getting everything done before leaving.

Before that it was post-holiday blues.

Before that it was pre-holiday blues.

Before that it was NaNoWriMo exhaustion.

And of course I can blame that bipolar monster of mine any time I can’t think of a better reason.

Wishcake had a post up the other day that touched on cleansing and detoxification. In the comment section, several people recommended various programs to try or avoid. It all piqued my interest, so I went to work on The Google.

On one website, I checked “yes” in about 75% of the boxes for toxicity risk factors. That’s everything from having silver fillings (like I can help THAT?) to working in a place with wall-to-wall-carpeting (again, not my fault) to being around smokers a lot (I don’t myself, but my friends have vices) and especially my diet (that one’s my fault). Almost everything I eat is processed, carbonated, pre-packaged, preservative-packed, sodium-happy, and low in actual nutrients.

Oh, and I drink. Sometimes rather a lot.

So, according to several websites, this could be the reason why…

• I am physically but not mentally tired so often
• I have a lot of tummy upsets, upper and lower GI
• I have a visible belly pooch post-eating
• I get a lot of headaches
• Water weight, water weight, water weight. (Beats me how I have this since I hardly drink water, but it’s there.)

I eat crap food and I know it. Too much junk, not nearly enough fruit and veg, and I am horrible water drinker. Apparently, these things could not only be contributing to my weight gain, but also to the buildup of a whole lot of nasty stuff in my digestive system, my liver, my kidneys, and my blood. I’ll spare you the details some of these websites go into, but trust me: EWW. I know that my diet is entirely my fault.

Because I absolutely cannot fathom the idea of giving up my beloved Diet Dr. Pepper forever, I’ve been looking into short-term cleansing systems that require a few weeks of massive (for me) diet changes, plus a shit-ton of vitamins and other herbal things. Not the scary plans where you only drink maple syrup and lemonade (WTF?), but just the sort of plan where I’d cut out junk food, fast food, alcohol (o noes!), carbonation, some meats, white carbs, and a few other things – then add in super lots of water, veggies, fruit, and certain fiberous things. You know, the stuff I should be eating ANYWAY. And, of course, whatever horse-pills of detox herbals go along with said plan.

I tell myself I can do it short-term. Supposedly I will feel so lovely and fresh and clean that I will stop craving such crappy food and will instead want the sort of healthy things that got me feeling so much better in the first place. And starting a short-term program doesn’t seem quite so intimidating as “I will never eat McNuggets again.”

There are always risks to these programs. One is that if it doesn’t work, I’ll crave not healthy things, but more and more tacos and peanut butter cups. And of course, what about all that stuff in the pills? Will I have nasty side effects like some people claim? Will the herbs clear out the good as well as the bad bacteria, making me vulnerable to infections? Will they interact with the medicine I already have to take every day?

Good patient that I am, I am starting this with a trip to the doctor who prescribes my meds, just to see what she has to say about interactions, etc. I have that appointment scheduled for next week. And of course I’m reading a ton of reviews, good and bad, about a lot of these various cleansing and detox systems.

This might be a good first step. What do you think?

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.

I often skip out on resolutions because I usually wind up with a big fat fail (literally) when I try to do things like exercise, lose weight or eat better. But I’m giving resolutions another shot this year, because 2009 was good but sort of aimless. I feel the need to pick up the pace in 2010, so I’ve set a few small goals and few large-ish ones.

I think #5, #6, and #7 will be the hardest, but probably the most important to me overall. The book-writing thing has been the voice in the back of my head for YEARS, and it’s time to do something about it, even if the result sucks. A lot of successful authors didn’t sell their first novels. I just have to be brave enough to fail. After all, who am I to tell bloggers that they must press on to meet their goals if I can’t press on with mine?

And so:

1. Take more pictures and KEEP THEM ORGANIZED.
2. Learn some new software. Specifically Photoshop so I can clean up my skin before I post said pictures.
3. Keep address book up to date.
4. Send Valentines.
5. Finish the novel. Even if it sucks. FINISH IT by the end of March. April. May.
6. Send finished novel to at least 5 agents, just to see if it really does suck.
7. Then start another one by June. July. August.
8. Don’t bother trying to lose weight. Just quit gaining it.
9. Put all money saved from deferred student loan payments directly into savings. Do Not Pass Go. Do not collect $200.
10. Do not pay full retail for books; be patient and buy used on Amazon or eBay.
11. Check 20SB at least every 3 days to remain active in discussions.
12. Do not change blog URL.
13. Write something for Guidespot without using the word “Wordpress.”

Pshhht. I can do this.

2000

• Was happily ensconced in a small-town university, pledging Sigma Alpha Iota.
• Was probably the most “popular” I’ve ever been, albeit in a shallow, “squeee!” sorority girl kind of way.

2001

• Met a boy and fell in love in the spring.
• Had a very difficult living situation upon returning to school in the fall.
• Got myself a little “unpopular” because people were driving me in-freaking-sane and I told them so.
• After changing my major three times in two and a half years, decided to leave school and move back home for awhile. Conveniently closer to the boy.

2002

• February 23: Got engaged!
• Set a date: August 9, 2003
• Wedding plan, plan, plan.
• Got a halfway decent job in retail and had a vague notion of starting back to school in radiation therapy.

2003

• Started at The Hospital as a secretary.
• Have to see a dead person for the first time. As in, the body bag thing.
• April: Best friend got married and I started to get the shakes.
• More in April: Argue, cry, make up, argue, cry, make up.
• May: Just before my first bridal shower and just before the invites go out in the mail, we break up.
• June: We get back together briefly, though decide not to worry about a wedding anytime soon. We break up again a month later.
• I start dating again and am told I have baggage.

2004

• Move into the city with a notion of becoming hip Urban Girl.
• Run up ridiculous credit card debt
• Travel alone for the first time – see England, Scotland and a little nubbin of France
• Start back part-time to finish my bachelor’s degree in English at Wash U.

2005

• The credit card debt catches up with me. That didn’t take long.
• Date a nice boy for awhile, my first real relationship of significant length since the fiance and I split.
• We break up and stay friends.
• I get a promotion at work.
• My blog “My Red Stapler” is born.
  

2006

• I graduate from college with a BS in English.
• I meet Tim.
• I don’t blog too much.
• I get an even better promotion at work and clear all credit card debt.
• I deal with being an Air Force WAG during a deployment.
• I buy a house and fix it up.

2007

• Winter: Tim and I break up in horrific fashion
• In emotional crisis mode, I buy a Jeep.
• Spring: I have a nervous breakdown of sorts.
• I briefly write a blog called “Therapy, Schmerapy.”
• In the fall, I meet and start dating E.
• I resolve to start blogging again on a more regular basis.

2008

• I get another promotion at work.
• I get a foster dog and have to send her back because she made my cat sick.
• Spring: E and I break up in horrific fashion.
• I have my first Blog Crush.
• I rename the blog “She’s Got Baggage.” It seems right at the time.
• I have a wild and crazy summer of dating inappropriate people. (Just read all of July and August 2008 for this.)
• I meet my first blog friends.
• Fall: E and I get back together
• I move to self-hosting my blog.
• I complete my first NaNoWriMo.

2009

• The economy begins to take its toll and I sell my beloved Jeep.
• E and I build a much stronger relationship than we ever had before. We think about the future.
• I have an awesome Girlfriend’s Guide to Gaming party sponsored by Nintendo and Brand About Town, and meet some more lovely bloggers.
• I attend BlogHer for the first time.
• More on the economy – I put my house on the market in early summer and sell it in early fall.
• I decide to ditch the baggage and rename the blog again.
• I password-protect a TON of old posts.
• I complete my 2nd NaNoWriMo with a much better product.
• I apply to and am accepted into a master’s program for Communications Management.

And what do I know for 2010?

• I start school next Wednesday.
• E and I are taking our first real, alone, not-visiting-family, proper vacation together in a week.

That’s all I’ve got so far.