While you were sleeping…
Couldn’t sleep. Figured I’d not sleep in line for monkey pox vax. First in line! Who doesn’t love a line.
I spent years, almost two decades working overnight in hospital labs. The other freaks of the night running around empty halls, chair races, raiding the cafeteria fridge, piling on empty beds to watch Bob Ross paint far away dreamy places without fluorescent lights and sick humans. I had the energy of 10 people, often working a play with a 6pm call time and hopping on BART to rush back to the hospital after the show. Invincible. You got to do things at night you’d never get away with during the daytime. Reading through pathology cases. A never ending source of human lives lived in interesting ways. I remember the guy who ate small doll heads, evacuated them, cleaned them and re-ingested them. Exploring the morgue. Before I knew how to get to the morgue, a surgery resident dropped off a lower leg and foot. I was to ‘handle it’ but not knowing protocol I put it in the lab fridge which.. if you didn’t know, is not cold enough for dead stuff. As I learned by morning when the day shift was greeted by the fresh smell of death.
We’d test each other’s blood, betting on the results. ‘Bet my prothrombin (clotting) time is quicker than your prothrombin time.’ Or we’d head over to the nicu (neonatal care unit) to see if any babies needed love. The ER was where all the action was and the staff in night shift ER’s are some next level types. As were
the people that came in but in totally different ways. There was the belligerent drunk driver whose arm slipped from the grip of 4 cops trying to secure him while I was hastily drawing blood landing a solid punch to my head. I remember the woman who came in on the 4th of July. Her brothers were setting off M-80’s and tossed one in her direction. She stomped on it thinking she would put it out. It exploded her lower leg from the inside. The outside was intact. The X-ray looked like broken shards of glass in varying sizes. We called a doctor in Colorado who had devised a bone lengthening device and asked him to come help this woman. Another night I walked into a room with the doctor standing, feet on the bed on either side of the sedated patient. His thumbs were in the patients mouth pushing down on the lower teeth to unhinge this poor guys jaw. He was a frequent flyer as his jaw refused to stay in its lane and kept dislodging. I used to write an email blog of sorts sharing the things humans get up too but it was kept in a yahoo account and if you don’t know this, inactivity will get your emails deleted. Lost to the ether.
People are starting to line up. This area of the hospital where the vax clinic is happens to be a wind tunnel. Between two buildings it can be bitterly cold, gale force like wind whipping you up and down. This morning it’s a low consistent hum of brrrr. As I stare at number 2 in lines’ Birkenstock’d feet wondering… is she new to summer in SF?
6am. Cold concrete under my butt as I stare through the glass door into a warm hallway with a padded chair sitting empty. So close to comfort. Bed is going to be extra extra when I get home. Losing feeling in my fingers. Til next time.
