a big, round, bouncing, baby boo-boo
They moved me to Pediatrics the very next day. That’s right, Pediatrics. The children’s wing. Why the children’s wing? Turns out I was at Fanny’s place: St. John’s Medical Center. I’m guessing they moved me there because that’s where Fanny worked, and she wanted me close by. Perhaps Fanny had a lot of pull at the hospital. Honestly, she was kind of a bully. But that’s okay; she was my bully.
As for me: for someone with a massive head injury, I wasn’t doing too bad either. Romantically, that is.
I don’t think I’m afraid of hospitals. Truth is, except for the day I was born, I’ve never even been in a hospital. If I do have Nosocomephobia, I’m not aware of it. There was only one problem. I wasn’t waking up. I was in a coma.
For those of you who think that when you’re in a coma you have no idea what’s going on around you, you’re wrong. I knew everything that was going on. I could hear everything, I could smell everything, and if I could just get my damn eyes open, I could see everything. Of course, if I opened my eyes I wouldn’t be in a coma, now would I?
When I say I could smell everything, that’s how I knew when Fanny was nearby. Dolce & Gabbana.
No, she wasn’t soaked in perfume while working, but I could smell the remnants of it. A good perfume: you never really lose the scent entirely.
Next thing I knew, I could hear her voice. Of course, Fanny had no idea.
“Well, now,” she said, “that’s one way to get a girl’s attention.”
Humor. Maybe I wasn’t so bad off after all.
“I bet you have one whale of a headache.”
Think, Moby Dick.
“You have a really hard head.”
It comes from practice.
“Anyone else would have had their skull squashed like a watermelon,” she said, “but not you.”
Where have you been, I asked her inside my head?
She told me she had been working double shifts, and sleeping at the hospital, that’s why I hadn’t seen her.
Could she hear me? Maybe we had some kind of telepathy thing going on.
She said she left a note on my door.
A note? Do you have any idea how long germs can survive on something as inconspicuous as a slip of paper? The flu, and even a common cold, can survive on the outside for forty-eight hours or more, and can be passed on something as seemingly harmless as a simple piece of paper?
Fanny came by often. Just doing her job, I guess; but I liked to think she was missing me. Maybe she was.
She stayed with me for the better part of that first night, talking to me like there was nothing wrong at all, like I could hear every word she was saying. I could. But she didn’t know that.
“I hope you’re not planning on staying in bed too long,” she said. “There’s this new French restaurant just opened up over on Wilshire: Le Vomi. I hear good things about it. They say they’ve got the best frog legs in town.”
More humor. I was getting used to it by now.
“I hear they don’t require you to remove your hat, and the escargot is to die for.”
For some reason, none of this bothered me, not the frog legs, the hat, not even the snails. I could lie here listening to Fanny all night. Why not? There’s nothing I could do about it anyway.
“So,” said Fanny, “how about a little bedtime story?”
Sounds good to me. Make it a long one; I’ve got all the time in the world.
“Okay,” said Fanny. “So, this is the story of Nurse Betty.”
Nurse Betty?
“For just about everyone in nursing, there’s at least one thing they cannot deal with. This usually revolves around bodily fluids, i.e. fecal matter, urine, vomit. For Nurse Betty, the admitting nurse in the ER, it was all three. That’s why she was often the butt of many a cruel joke. Truth is, trauma nurses pretty much behave like monkeys in a zoo.
“One day the ER was particularly lively when this extremely large woman comes in with her belly sticking out like she’s about to give birth. As nurses, we knew right away: the woman was not pregnant, at least not with child.
“This particular woman had what obese people call a boo-boo, which is fat people jargon meaning she had a gigantic turd packed up in her rectum.
“We knew we had to get her to the toilet, stat, before the whole place went up like Mt. St, Helens. But there just wasn’t time. The problem was, she was too big to get off the gurney. This woman weighed five hundred pounds if she weighed an ounce.
“So, we tried rolling her over to put a bed pan under her; but then we realized we were going to have another problem: they just don’t make bed pans big enough for what was about to come out of this woman. Suddenly, one of the nurses had a flash of genius. She slid a mop bucket under the woman, then stood back and said a prayer.
“Praying, by the way” said Fanny, “is not standard medical procedure.
“While all this is going on,” Fanny continued, “some guy gets hauled in with a blood-sugar level of forty. What does having a blood-sugar level of forty mean? It means you’re out of your frigging mind. Literally, clinically insane.
“Turns out the guy was in the war and is having flashbacks. To boot, he’s got a prosthetic leg and he’s now using it for batting practice on the staff.
“By the time we get the man under control, we discover a foul stench coming from the vicinity of Little Miss Boo-Boo. That’s right, the lady with the boo-boo has filled up the mop bucket and now her fecal expulsion is erupting out all over the place. Who knows what this lady has been eating. All we knew at this point was that it was alive.
We get into our hazmat suits, but even they can’t shield us the foul stench. We put coffee grounds in our gas masks and go in for the kill. No job too big. What we found, no one had ever seen before.
“There, right before our very eyes, was a perfectly formed boo-boo. A big, round, bouncing baby boo-boo. ‘It’s a boy!’ one of the nurses shouted out, and it was the biggest boo-boo any of us had ever seen. It was forty pounds if it was an ounce—the size of a football—and as hard as rock candy. That thing must have been up in her rectum for months.
“We wrapped up that boo-boo in a baby blanket and placed it in a crib, then rolled it up behind Nurse Betty. Nurse Betty was the only one in the ER who did not have a sense of humor. When she started smelling that big boo-boo, she turned towards what she thought was a newborn baby.
“’Oh, what do we have here?’ said Nurse Betty, who picked up the excrement in the blanket and cuddled it up against her cheek. ’Did the little boo-boo make a boo-boo?’
“We all started laughing hysterically as Nurse Betty began kissing that big ball of poo. Some were laughing so hard, they even fell on the floor.
“As you may have guessed,” said Fanny, “nursing humor is an acquired taste.
“While all this is going on, there’s the guy still swinging his leg around while one of the nurses has got two phones going, trying to call in the cavalry. Never a dull moment in the ER.”
It worked. Not only did her story help me to sleep, it put me right into a coma.
Fanny was one of those people who was so hysterical, she didn’t even know she was funny. That’s how nurses are. Go ahead, try telling a nurse a standard joke sometime. You won’t even get a reaction. But listen to a nurse go on and on about defective penile implants, rectal exams, or massive cerebral hemorrhaging, and you’ll realize exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you. Yes, nurses do have a sense of humor, but it’s like no other. It takes a special kind.
