It was seven in the evening when I entered the building, suspecting little, wearing my scrubs with the nametag that says, Lisa Postman, RN. When I graduated from nursing school, night shift wasn’t my cup of tea, but after several months of fruitless job searching, I was glad to settle for it. Now it feels like breathing in and out more or less. This particular night, I had five patients, two with mild dementia and the usual bunch with various heart complaints. I was on a roll that night–got my assessments done, meds passed and patients comfy in bed in short order. By eleven, they were all sleeping like a bunch of sweet angels and I sat down at the nurses’ station to work on charting. I had it made in the proverbial shade with a glass of lemonade.
I do believe Cinderella’s fairy godmother or some other fairy with a flair for the practical joke put a spell on all hospitals, because it seems that at the stroke of twelve midnight, the strangest things can happen to unsuspecting nurses. For instance, there’s that phenomenon of “sundowners,” where patients who are pretty okay and pleasant turn batty on a dime when the sun goes down. Such was my lot this night.
At twelve, I was sitting calmly at the station, discussing a problem with my very petite fellow nurse, Leann, when a wild-eyed figure loomed in the doorway of room 16. I recognized him as the patient in Bed 1. He stood there in the door, swaying from side to side, his Foley catheter dangling just above the floor and swinging like the pendulum in my mother’s clock at home. The oxygen nasal cannula pulled his nose and stretched it to the side since by some miracle the tube was still hooked to the wall.
“Help!” he yelled, “They’re robbing me!”
“Who’s robbing you?” we both asked, running to him.
“You are!”
We tried to calm him down, but he only whipped off his oxygen, wrapped the tubing around his hand in lieu of steel knuckles and brandished it over his head. We tried calling security to “apprehend the muggers,” but he didn’t fall for that either.
“You get that arm and leg,” I told Leann, “and I’ll get these. Ready, set, go!”
“Help! Help!”
A cloud of nurses descended on room 16 at the noise. Soon enough, there were six nurses struggling to get one patient back in bed.
“Watch it, Leann!” I yelled, as Bed 1 got ready to chomp down on her hand.
“Careful, he’s trying to pull the oxygen out of the wall!” another nurse shouted.
In the midst of this wrestling match, the guy in bed 2 woke up, calmly pulled out his urinal, relieved himself and went back to sleep. I shook my head and charged back into the fray. After a shot of something calming, Bed 1 went back to sleep.
Meanwhile, the little old lady down the hall had decided to strip down to her birthday suit. At the commotion, I rushed down to help out.
“Please put your clothes on, Mrs. Smith,” Jeffery, another RN, was begging.
“I will not!” she shouted. “You green alien! I know about you. You’re trying to kill the Jews, I know it.”
“Mrs. Smith,” I ordered. “Put your clothes on this minute.”
“No!” she said and then scooted away from me as I reached for her discarded hospital gown. “Don’t you touch me! My blood will be on your hands in the morning.”
While we were dealing with this situation, Bed 2 in room 16 woke up again. Leann caught him wandering past the nurses’ station, flashing everyone in the hall because he had forgotten to fasten his gown. It was the kind of wardrobe malfunction to surpass a super bowl half-time show with a full moon to boot. He was blissfully unaware of the blood dripping from his arm where he had ripped out his IV.
“Hey, pal! Where you going?” Leann asked.
“Well, I think I’ll go home now,” he remarked cheerily. “No point in staying around here.”
“I think you better wait until the morning,” she said, deftly catching him by the arm and steering him back to bed to start another IV.
“Oh, is that so?” he smiled agreeably. “All right then.”
At precisely the moment Leann got Bed 2 settled in, Bed 1 sat up in bed like a specter rising from the tomb and looked around in confusion.
“Heeelllllpppp! They’re robbing me,” were the first words out of his lips. A horde of nurses rushed back to quell the uprising.
I went home in the morning exhausted. I sat down and stared at the wall. Then I laughed, laughed so hard my stomach hurt. I sobered. A sudden memory crossed my mind and I started thinking about the night before….
…Mr. Hollis in room 12. Slender, intelligent and dying from cancer. It couldn’t just be cancer either. He had the whole works-pneumonia, congestive heart failure and he was on contact isolation because of infection that had spread through his entire system.
I looked down on his emaciated body and said the only thing I could think of, “Keep your chin up, Mr. Hollis.”
Tears filled his eyes and began to spill over. He lifted his hand and patted my face with his infection-ridden hand.
“I love you,” he said.
Yes, I reflected, nursing could be a real circus sometimes. Then there were moments like that when all the crazy nights were worth it.
I picked myself off my chair and crawled into my pajamas. Time to sleep the day away and do it all over again in the evening.