Okay, ready for a little hoosegow black humor after that outpouring of misery yesterday?

When you spend a long period of time visiting someone in the hoosegow every day all day, you see and hear a lot of things. People sneaking chewing tabaccy in, the S.W.A.T. team, your old boyfriend’s brother, etc. etc. And then there was the Ativan woman… I cannot remember what day it was that I first heard, “Help! Help! I can’t breathe!” but it was while npJane and UKW were here because I know they also remember it. She shouted it over and over and over again and my first thought was something like, “Why doesn’t someone go and help that poor woman?” But then I thought, “Wait a minute. She is down the hall inside another room and I can hear her from here. I bet there’s nothing wrong with her lungs or her breathing.”

And I was right. I know that medical professionals are not supposed to talk about patients within earshot of other people but the med-surg floor of the hoosegow is a busy, constantly fluctuating place and I could hear discussions about this woman out in the hall. “Her O₂ sats are 98%. There’s nothing wrong with her lungs. We’ve tried over and over to reassure her.” Then God the doc came along. I could hear him lecturing the [totally competent] nurse, “All you need to do is reassure her that there’s nothing wrong.” Nurse wearily replied that she’d been doing that all morning. “OK, *I* will tell her!”, said God the doc and he charged into her room. After a few minutes, I could hear God the doc telling the nurse something about calling in a psychiatrist. Okay then.

Eventually somebody gave her some Ativan, which is prescribed for anxiety, as I now know. I guess the Ativan must’ve helped because she subsequently added “Help! I need my Ativan!” to her vocabulary. Later on I could hear the nurses joking about how many doses of Ativan they were allowed to give her. One asked, “Can’t you give her two?” The reply was something like, “I wish I could but I don’t want to lose my job.” It takes some black humor to survive the crazy days at any job and nurse has to be one of the craziest. I understood.

Why did I think of this tonight? Well. Because I was hanging out here at the Squatter’s Paradise for a while on this blustery, lake-effect snow-type day and I looked out the front window and I could swear I saw Ativan woman’s son shuffling down the street. I’m not *sure* if it was him but it sure looked like the same jacket and gait. He did have boots on. He was walking around the *hoosegow* in SOCKS! Uh, there is c. diff diarrhea about, don’tcha know? I wonder if his mom is still in the hoosegow and if he was shuffling down there to see her…

I never saw the Ativan woman and I don’t know who she is but it sounded like she walks around at maybe 100 or a little less and so does her son. Whatever she is all about, she *was* suffering and her son was down there with her. I do not know what their financial status is but it is these people who our country needs to try to protect. I wish them the best.

P. S. I loved the comments about jury duty yesterday and I replied with a comment of my own, if anyone’s interested.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.