Olive Tamponade

The story ends with pickled olives rolling across the operating room floor. The story begins with a guy in a bar. He had a little too much to drink and got into an argument with another guy in the bar. One guy passes out and later awakens with the belief that a jar is in his rectum. He isn't sure how it got there, but believes the guy he got into an argument with is responsible. He doesn't call the police or go to the hospital.

Two days go by. He can no longer stand it and comes to the ER. He refuses to let the nurse call the police. Normally, the police would be called anyway, but given the silly story he came up with, it was thought best to just treat him and say nothing.

He was taken to OR and put under. The surgeon inflated balloons behind it to keep it from migrating up further. I'm still wondering if he used party balloons or what. Anyway, when the jar came out, it was with such force that it hit the surgeon on the chest, splattering him with poop. The jar fell to the floor and broke. You know how the story ends.

I've known this surgeon for eight years and when he was telling the story and showing us the x-rays, it was the first time I had ever seen him smile. It just warms the heart.

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Walking down the hospital corridor, I heard an annoying shrill alarm. It sounded like the negative pressure alarm. It goes off frequently for no apparent reason and we just have to live with it. Had I recognized it as a bed alarm, I would have walked faster and been perhaps prepared for what I saw next. A naked old man, covered in blood, was roaming the hallway. A trail of blood led from his room to another patient's room and back out into the hall. The woman behind the door where the blood trail led, was screaming. I figured there was a connection between the two events.

My first reaction was oh %$#^&. He belonged to me. The nurse's aide had warned me that the patient had escaped during an earlier hospitalization, but I thought that just setting the bed alarm would do the trick. He seemed okay at the time and I really didn't want to tie him up or use our precious nurse's aide to watch him.

With bare hands, I grabbed his bloody arm and led him back to his room. He had just had major surgery a few hours earlier and had pulled out his chest tube. Air was leaking from the little hole in his chest. Blood was pouring from the wound and running down his legs and, of course, he had pulled out his IV's and blood was pouring from them too.

I looked around for help, but nobody was around. I sat him in a chair and ran to get some dressing materials to stop the air leak. On the way to the supply room, I passed a big, red furry Elmo. In a high pitched voice, he said, "Wash your hands." Unbelievable. My employer has money to hire a cartoon charater to wander the hospital and tell people wash their hands, but doesn't have money for safe staffing.

When I came back, he was walking out of the room again. He was looking for a bathroom. I promised him that as soon as I covered the wound, I would take him to the bathroom. I continued to ignore the woman screaming for help in the room with the blood trail.

After I got the wound covered, nurses appeared and helped. The woman whose room he walked into was even more hysterical. She couldn't understand why she could scream for several minutes without anyone coming to her rescue. She said that the naked bloody man came into her room and closed the door behind him. He was doing something around her sink and mumbling. She believed he bore evil intent; I think he was just looking for a bathroom and he mistook her sink for a urinal.

Anyway, security came and filed a report. A social worker was called to calm her down. The house supervisor talked to her. Then the house supervisor talked to me. She wanted to know why I didn't go into the screaming woman's room right away. I explained that my sole concern was saving my patient's life. I couldn't allow air to continue to leak out of my patient's chest while I responded to another patient who was not in jeopardy. The supervisor then wanted to know why there were no other nurses at the nurse's station to help. I just said that they were busy in other rooms and unaware of what was happening. I didn't say it, but that is what happens when staffing is cut to the bones and they fill us up with very sick people.

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We have already lost a young pregnant patient to swine flu. Other patients have it too. The nurses are at high risk of becoming infected, especially since they took our special masks away that provide protection against viruses. The masks are too expensive. We have been told that if we want to be vaccinated, which they strongly encourage, we need to go downstairs and wait in line with everyone else. We don't have time to stand in line for hours, so it is not going to happen. If management wants us to be protected, they need to send someone up with a basket of vaccine and syringes and shoot us up. That is how ordinary flu shot time is handled.

We don't have any extra nurses. If nurses get sick, they either work while sick and make everyone else sick or the hospital is dangerously short-staffed. I suspect that management hasn't thought through the consequences of making it so difficult for the nurses to be vaccinated.

A Rescue At Sea

The sinking of the Titanic was in the back of our minds. Halifax, Novia Scotia is where most of the victims of the Titanic are buried and that is where we had spent the day. Of course, we weren't worried about our ship sinking. Princess cruise ships don't sink. But still, when you're in the North Atlantic, the Titanic does cross one's mind.

After we were back on the ship, a storm struck. It doesn't seem like twelve foot waves and high winds should affect a huge cruise ship, but we were being tossed from side to side. Thunderous blows sent shudders through the ship, loose stuff was banging the outside of the ship and sometimes the ship would go up and just drop. To amuse ourselves, we would bet how far we could walk without being thrown against a wall.

Another source of amusement was watching the tsunami-like waves coming out of the swimming pool. And then, we heard the ship's horn blow. Being in the North Atlantic in a storm and hearing that sound freaked us out. Something terrible must have happened. We've only heard the ship's horn in ports, not at sea. We vaguely remembered that something like seven blasts in a row meant to prepare to abandon ship. We didn't know what one blast meant. It seemed like a good time to go back inside.

Careful to maintain our cool demeanor, we walked over to the first employee we saw, who was busy stringing up yellow "do not cross" crime scene tape across the doors to the outside. Cheerfully, he replied that in the fog, the ship has to blow its horn periodically. I wasn't sure I believed him, but that was the official answer to our question.

Feeling a little queasy, I wanted to go get a piece of bread to coat my stomach. The problem was that the food was on the fifteenth floor and Lindsay was afraid to go up there. Normally, Lindsay was very happy to go to the fifteenth floor, but this time we knew the rocking would be worse up there. After a while, he bravely agreed to escort me up there. We quickly ate and got out of there.

It was getting late, so we decided to go to bed. Sleep was difficult. With all of the booms, rattles and rocking, we just laid there. Then, we heard a sound that caused us to jerk in fear. The room intercom chimes went off, followed by an announcement about an emergency on board. A passenger was critically ill and needed blood. I would have liked to help, but I was the wrong blood type. We didn't know what had happened, but it didn't seem like there could be a good outcome unless the patient got off the ship as soon as possible.

Around one a.m., the chimes sounded again. This time, it was the captain waking everyone up. We were expecting the worst. The captain of a cruise ship isn't going to wake everyone in the middle of the night unless something bad is happening. He spent way too long apologizing before getting to the point. In the meantime, I couldn't believe this was happening. Surely, he was going to tell us the ship was going down. When the captain finally got to the point and told us we had to go back to Halifax and meet the Coast Guard for a helicopter evacuation of the critically ill passenger, I was so relieved. I was looking forward to watching the rescue operation, but we slept through it.

I later learned that the top floors of the passenger cabins had been evacuated, the lifeboats were lowered into the water and fire fighting equipment was set up on the deck. With the rocking boat, high wind and darkness, there was a possibility that the helicopter might crash into the ship. The basket was lowered three times before they got it right, but the passenger was eventually safely pulled up into the helicopter and taken to a hospital.

Early the next morning, the captain once again woke us up with some bad news. After he finished his apologies, we learned that the rescue operation had been successful, the passenger was still alive and in stable condition, but that we were behind schedule. There would be no port day in Sydney, Novia Scotia. Of course that was fine. Considering all of the things that could have gone wrong, missing a port was not a problem at all.