(My friend the doctor swears this actually happened to his patient.)

A man of late years was admitted to the emergency room with pain in his leg. They hooked him up to a few machines to check his vital signs, and noticed that his oxygen saturations were in the low 70s.

That’s like breathing nothing. That’s like being, well… DEAD.

But he was sitting up and talking to the nurses. All of his other vital signs were in normal ranges and he didn’t exhibit any signs of difficulty breathing. The staff panicked when they saw that number on the monitor, though, and scrambled to put the man on supplementary oxygen.

With the tubing placed and the oxygen flowing, the man’s oxygen saturations jumped up to a normal range in the mid-90s. And then all the rest of his vitals started going crazy. His heart rate went up. His blood pressure made a jump. And he was coughing and struggling to breathe… until they took the oxygen off him, and his sats dropped back into the 70s and all other vitals returned to normal.

HUH?

It emerged that the patient, a cigarette smoker of many packs per day for fifty years, had all the classic lung damage you’d expect. But he didn’t have emphysema or lung cancer. His crappy lungs had adapted themselves so well to the ever-increasing damage over the years that they were able to function in a less-than-optimal state and still sustain life.

That’s some crazy shit. But that’s evolution at its finest.

I bring this up because of that whole detox thing I’m interested in. Last week, before I was able to see my doctor about the herbal system, I decided it couldn’t hurt to start drinking more water and eating better beforehand. So I committed myself to 64 ounces of water per day, no more fried foods or candy, and no more soda.

Take a wild guess at what happened.

Not only did I have the major caffeine withdrawal (I expected that, of course), I had more stomach upsets and sleeplessness without fried food or caffeine. I actually felt DEHYDRATED from drinking that much water – my skin and lips were painfully dry. Every time I’d have a salad for lunch, even with dressing and some chicken on it, my blood sugar would drop in the early afternoon and I’d have to slug a bottle of orange juice just to get enough natural sugars in me to function the rest of the day at work.

Then on top of that, I got a cold. And I just couldn’t take the stomach aches AND the sniffles.

So I’m back on Diet Dr. Pepper and McChickens and peanut butter cups for now because my body simply cannot handle the cold-turkey quit of everything crappy that I’ve fed it. It just straight up REBELLED when I tried to cut out fried and over-processed foods and replace them with greens and fruit! The caffeine withdrawal I was expecting, that’s normal… but what about the rest of it?

Can you have a physiological addiction to grease and sodium like you can nicotine? I really want to know.

The doctor said the herbal thing is fine, so the new plan is to sloooowly cut out those foods over the next two weeks or so, and then do the detox system.

Besides, it would be pointless to start a diet before the Super Bowl parties anyway, right? Beer, nachos, beer, pizza, beer, little hot dogs in BBQ sauce in a Crock Pot, beer…

What’s your addiction? Have you ever tried to quit?

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.

Just to catch up on a few things…

Since July I’ve been in the application process for a new job here at The Hospital. A friend of mine in the marketing department clued me in to the fact that they were thinking of creating a position to coordinate The Hospital’s growing social media outreach projects, so I fired off an email to the director of the department before the job was even posted. I interviewed a few months ago and was asked back for a second interview, which finally took place in September because the creation of a new job role got tangled up in HR for weeks on end.

My first interview was with a panel of four people, and they really liked me. They liked my resume, liked my writing samples, liked my personality, and la la la. Of course I was really excited about the opportunity to get a foot in the door in the marketing department – without a degree in the field, that’s a tricky thing to do, but my experience in internal and external communications within my current department has helped me build a portfolio of sorts that’s at least halfway impressive to anyone within this organization. To an outside group, who knows – which is why finding this type of job at The Hospital was a plum chance for me.

But, after much hard work (and even a homework assignment!) preparing for the second interview, I found out (on moving day, natch) that despite nailing the second interview, I came in second place to someone from an outside agency who had more experience in the industry. The manager who called me was very apologetic and reiterated all the things about how they thought I was great and would be an asset to their department and if anything ever came open they would absolutely call me because they were all so impressed, just not the right fit for this job because of lack of experience, and so on and so forth.

But you know how it is. Hear that after a rejection and no matter how sincere the bearer of the bad news is, everything feels like lip service. And I was in the Hardee’s drive-thru line when I got the call, which didn’t help.

And of course this all took place on moving day, which you all know was SUCH a wonderful day to deal with – well, anything.

I drove to E’s house.

“I didn’t get it, baby.” He opened his arms and I snuggled into his chest and got all teary. “I’m giving myself ten minutes to mope,” I sniffed. “Then I have to deal with the rest of this crap and I can’t cry any more.” He said many comforting things and rubbed my shoulders and kissed my hair like the wonderful boyfriend he is. When my ten minutes were up, I forced myself to get back to the business of moving.

Maybe it was for the best that I got the news on a day that was already crappy. I had to suck it up and move on. Literally.

I understand their reasons, of course. I wouldn’t have wanted to go into a job for which I was ill-prepared and lacked the experience necessary to totally kick ass. I can’t ride on personality alone, and if I’m not qualified, then I’m not qualified. I can deal with that.

It’s a field I really want to be in. My boss knows that, and after I told her why I didn’t get the job, she said she was going to make an effort to help me get more experience within our department so I could build up my resume a bit more. She also offered to sign off on tuition reimbursement if I’d like to take a class or three in order to boost my academic credentials.

(Boss, I LOVE YOU. The only reason I want to go work for anyone else is because I know that if you won the lottery tomorrow, you would probably not take me to Bermuda with you and I’d be stuck here working for people not half as awesome as you are.)

That brings me to grad school.

I tried it once before and my first class in the Master’s in Project Management really made it quite clear that I did NOT want to work in Project Management after all. I do okay at it right now, but this is not where I want to be. This is not the kind of work that inspires me or even makes me a tiny bit happy. So I’ve been digging into info on graduate programs in the St. Louis area (online learning, not my thing) and found one school that has several Master’s programs in communications that all have the same core courses. So I could take one or two classes and then head into a program in Media Communications, Media Literacy, or Communications Management.

I was rolling this over in my brain when I got a call from the director of the Marketing Department last week. She called to apologize for not having been in touch since the interview (she was not the one who made that first call to me) and to reiterate how impressed she was with me and really wanted to have me in their department when something suitable became available.

I was truly touched. After a few weeks of mellowing out post-rejection, the same words didn’t feel like lip service anymore. They sounded more honest, more true – true enough to make me feel like even little inexperienced me could have a shot at moving into the field I really want to be in.

I seized the moment and asked her about the graduate programs I was considering. Would one of these be worthwhile, what do you think of the school, what do you think of a possible emphasis in this or that? She was so encouraging and seemed pretty pumped that I was seeking this out on my own.

Little Miss Initiative, that’s me. But seriously, who wants to get thisclose and get shot down again? The resume isn’t going to improve itself, you know.

“And I hope you don’t mind,” she continued, “but I took the liberty of sending your resume and application information over to the VP of [department]. I was speaking to her the other day and they’re thinking about creating a similar position to support their new [redacted] campaign, so I told her about you.”

YOU. HOPE. I. DON’T. MIND?!

Guuuuhhh.

It may become something, it may not. At the moment, the job in the other department doesn’t really exist yet, it’s just an idea they’re tossing around. But my name is in there. Yowza.

And graduate school starts in January.

I’m not actively job-hunting. Work is fine right now and I have a good job that pays the bills. But a new position is being created in another department at The Hospital and I really feel like that job and I could just love each other forever. I’ve talked with the leadership people in that department and they’ve said they’re definitely interested in me, etc.

I was feeling optimistic.

Then I got an email from Human Resources.

“Thanks for applying to (job). We have considered your application and come to the conclusion that you are way out of your league and we’re going to continue to look for a better applicant with less laughable qualifications. Good luck with your life.”

Or something like that. Like all rejection letters, that’s what it felt like.

So I was sad. Disappointed in myself. Could I have written a better resume? Been more professional when talking with the people in that department? Demonstrated better communication skills? Worn better shoes?

The thing is, I honestly don’t think I am under-qualified for that job. I think I would kick ass, frankly. But things are what they are, and people will make choices that don’t make me happy.

I was determined to resign myself to that fact – after all, I still had a work day to get through before I could go home and pout with my friend Bud (Select). So I frowned, sent a “didn’t get the job, boo on life” text to E, and resolutely turned my attention back to my NovaMind project.

Three minutes later, another email.

From HR.

Huh?

“Please disregard the previous email. Due to a glitch in our system, that message was sent to you by mistake. You are still being considered for (job) and we apologize for your three minutes of sadness.”

YAY! I mean, WTF, but YAY!

Apartment news on the way…

I’ve been working for a few weeks on some posters and other edu-ma-cational goodies for the staff in my department. One of the national regulatory agencies has issued a set of rules we must follow, and my job was to create the various visuals for the education blitz.

There was a lot of back-and-forth about how to word this, how to explain that, until the Powers That Be all finally agreed on the copy and let me have at it with the design work. I was determined to make these things – the posters especially – absolutely professional and perfect. I mentioned to The Boss that due to a lack of appropriate stock photos in my arsenal, I was having a friend from PR come and take some photos in the operating room with me.

“Just make sure everyone is wearing eyewear,” The Boss said. “People keep taking pictures of staff without eyewear and that should never happen.” Duly noted.

My friend and I went into an OR to take the pictures and a nurse stopped us at the door to check that we had our masks and eyewear on. We did, and so did everyone else in the room. After explaining why we were there and getting the releases signed, my friend took some photos of the appropriately eyewear-ed staff and we were done.

I picked out two of the photos and used them on the poster design. They looked perfect. I sent everything to the printer and was hopping happily when 19 big posters were delivered today. The Boss wasn’t in her office, so I left them propped up by her desk.

She calls me.

“The posters look great,” she says. “One thing. Can you come up for a second?”

Doom.

“What’s up?” I ask, walking into her office. She is looking at the poster and biting her lip. “What is it?”

She points at one of the photos. “The girl in the pink scrub cap. She’s not wearing eyewear.”

I squint. “She has to be. They all were.”

“But she doesn’t have goggles on and those masks with the built-in eyeshields have a black stripe. There’s no stripe. The Vice-President and I just noticed it.”

Crap crap crap. How did this happen? I swear to GOD she was wearing eyewear. That was the nurse who checked mine! And now I have violated my sacred charge to make sure that everything we print is compliant with every rule from everywhere.

“I’ll fix them,” I say in a small voice. I want to hide. The Boss shrugs apologetically – she really sympathizes, I know, because she reminds me that she approved the proof, so it’s not just me that missed it. Still. I don’t feel any better. I mentally stamp my forehead with a big “FAIL” and slog back down to my office.

I open the folder of photos and click through until I find the ones from that OR. There’s the girl in the pink scrub cap, not wearing eyewear.

I zoom in. And in. And in.

And there, at 400% magnification, I see it: the glint of a thin plastic eyeshield on a new variety of mask that does NOT have a black stripe.

“I see it I see it I see it!” I yelp to no one in particular, and skitter back upstairs. “She IS!” I say triumphantly, bursting back into The Boss’s office. “She IS wearing eyewear!” I pick up a poster and wave it around.

The Boss picks up her glasses and narrows her eyes at the photo. “Where?”

“That little glimmer. I saw it at 400% zoom. I swear.”

“There?” She points. I nod. Hooray! No need to reprint $800 worth of posters because I made a mistake – because I DIDN’T! Win! The Boss high-fives me and I leave.

“Hey, I’m not so dumb after all,” I say happily to The Boss’s secretary.  “Yay me!” And as I’m speaking, I’m turn toward the doorway and almost run smack into the Vice-President.

“She is wearing eyewear,” I announce, and run away before he can ask me to prove it.

I’ll send him the file.