andhumanslovedstories:
I’m the house resource nurse but no one needs any additional nursing help so I’m embarking on a really stupid fetch quest, wish me luck
Okay so they thought the emergency department might get slammed later in the night so they put me, someone who is ED trained a little, in the role of house resource in case they needed to suddenly drag me to the ED. Which means my job is to go around to each floor and be like “hey I’m here do you need help?” and the floors were like “I mean nothing I can think of right now,” and I go “cool well call me if anything comes up” and they say “for sure” and never call me. So I was responsible for no patients and no one needed anything from me and the ED was doing fine. I’m basically just doing rounds every couple hours to make sure everyone is continuing to not need me so I can get back to reading.
I go up to neuro and find them (again. quiet night) dressing up a container of cleaning wipes in a baby onesie someone must have lost. They shoved wash clothes in the limbs to give it structure. Someone says “oh if only it had a little hat.” And me, person who is doing nothing and also knows we have a maternity flood, is like “I mean. I can get a hat.”
So I go to the maternity floor which is on the other side of the hospital, and it’s a locked unit which means I have to go in through the front desk where someone asks me what’s up. And I’m like hmmmm. I didn’t think of what to say. And in retrospect, I probably could have just asked for a hat. They got a lot of lil baby hats. Instead, the conversation went like this
Maternity nurse: how can I help you?
Me: need a hat. For a baby. His head is cold.
Maternity nurse who is staring at me with frankly more confusion than I think she needs to be expressing: a…baby?
Me: yup. real human baby.
Maternity nurse: how old is the baby?
Me, apparently deciding to “yes and”: one month. He’s a visitor’s baby. He is small.
Maternity nurse: our hats aren’t going to fit him.
Me:
Me:
Me:
Maternity nurse: but I can give you a hat if you want to try?
Me: neurology is doing an art project and I promised them a baby hat please give me a baby hat
The maternity nurse agrees and takes me back with her to a room full of actual babies that I am ROBBING with my entirely unnecessary lies. And I’m like great, forget you ever saw me, and go back to neuro. And I’m so psyched to show them the hat.
But I get to the floor and there five nurses standing around a room with a comfort care sign on the door, which means a patient who is no longer receiving curative treatments and is now on hospice. And again. There’s just a whole group of nursing standing outside the room of just such a patient. I’m like “oh my god now is not the time to dramatically reveal the baby hat, someone just DIED,” but then the door to the room opens and a cloud of tobacco smokes rolls out as the charge nurse emerges. Because presumably the comfort care patient was like “what are they possibly going to do about it” and smoked a cigarette, which you super can’t do in the hospital, and then got rid of the still burning butt by flicking it out of his bed and into the nearby sink where it started melting a bedpan someone left there.
(I think one of the reasons that this event was so baffling to all of us is that people smoke in the hospital all the time, it’s just fentanyl and meth. So we’re all like “just a cigarette? Like a normal cigarette? Nothing added? Do we need to…do something???” Meanwhile there’s a second theoretical discussion going on about well, the guy is dying. Maybe we can take him to like a special room to smoke? Like clearly we’ve identified an important part of palliative care for him. Surely we’ve got like one abandoned smoker’s lounge left over from the 80s.)
Anyway I presented my baby hat, we dressed the child who now had a homemade hospital ID band, and then gave it the confiscated lighter and cigarettes. Behold the spirit of the new year, technically the first baby delivered at our hospital in the year 2024:
His name is Tommy and we all got holiday pay