Slinging Bed Pans and Saving Lives, Part I

It was my first time solo. She was very beautiful, which was no help, I was already nervous. She was also deaf which was even worse, for my efforts were not met with silence but with a plaintive animal-like wail unrestricted by any self-consciousness. She may not have even been aware that people in other rooms could hear her .

I gave up and released the knotted band around her arm. There was no way I was getting any blood from her veins. I put down my needle and test tube and got a nurse to take over.

I never aspired to work in the medical field. I have been told I have a talent for patient care but to be honest, I didn't care for it. I was a musician and I needed keep myself in bass strings, that was all there was to it.

What do you call a bass player without a girlfriend?

Homeless.

I had no girlfriend so I needed to come up with rent too.

It all started out innocently enough; I was standing by my locker in high school and said “I have to find a job,” to no one in particular.

“I've got a job for you,” said Dave Clark.

Dave, who I barely knew, was about to change jobs and his old one as a X-ray transporter at F.F. Thompson Hospital. After school we went to meet his boss, Don, who was a gruff sort who, as I remembered later, had been the one who X-rayed my foot after a childhood bike accident.

F.F. Thompson Hospital

Before I knew it I was working Saturdays wheeling patients to and from X-ray, taking sheets of film from X-ray cassettes and feeding them into the developer. On my second day on the job I opened the door to the darkroom after forgetting to close the film drawer. I'll never forget having to tell Don I ruined twelve hundred dollars of film. Somehow I lived to tell about it but never came close to doing in again.

I used to religiously watch the show “Emergency”, a TV series about Paramedic firemen which included the goings-on at a hospital. A few of the kids on my school bus were also big fans also and we would 'play' Emergency on the bus -with each kid getting off at a different 'fire' along the way. I was one of the last kids off the bus but in my head I was still 'playing'. Because we lived in a remote corner of the township our bus was a small one, not even a dozen kids. Each kid on the bus played a different character on the show. I was Captain Stanley, Matt Colf was Roy , Beth Repard was Johnny and Dave Carson, whose favorite show was really “Scooby Doo” himself chose to be “Boots” the fire house dog.

One day I was wheeling a patient on a stretcher over to X-ray from the ER wearing my white lab coat. I passed my friend Beth in the hall who had become an EMT and was dressed in her blue uniform. I thought back to playing Emergency on the bus.

Whoa, head-trip!

Eventually, Sundays were added to my schedule. Sundays were nice because there were no scheduled exams and generally less to do... other than the Sunday ER regulars: There was always hand X-rays for the morons that punch a wall after some girl left the party with someone else. Now that they were sober the next morning, that sucker was really starting to hurt. There was usually some skier who would hit a tree or something else at Bristol Mountain during the winter. Summer had it's share of mishaps too with the lake shore population doubling and running into each other apparently. There were of course car accidents year round but always more when it was snowing. My favorite was the abdominal exams late on sunday afternoon for the folks that could see Monday on the horizon and weren't about to take it lying down... meaning that they had every intention of taking it lying down... all day; so they needed a doctors excuse.

Sundays were no picnic though. The work-load was lighter but then there was Liz to deal with.

Liz was an X-ray technician that worked from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning. That's right: forty hours straight, one marathon shift. She would make up a stretcher and sleep when she could, but there were unlucky weekends when she barely had a moment to close her eyes the whole time, “Crazy busy” she called it. Anyone that would agree to such a work schedule, it shouldn't be a big surprise to learn they are a bit um... 'touched'.

Liz was unique, to put it politely. Working with her was a trip and there wasn't much peace in it. To say Liz was a talker is like saying that Rush Limbaugh leans a tad to the right or that a competing in a triathlon is getting some exercise. From the moment I walked in Sunday morning till I left in the afternoon she never stopped talking. There was at least one occasion at the end of the day that I backed away slowly trying to interrupt her endless stream of trivial commentary to take my leave. “Okay, gotta go Liz... that's nice Liz but I... okay, yeah I'm really leaving now... yeah uh huh... bye... yeah... okay...” As I walked down the hall I could still hear her talking to me in the empty X-ray lounge area. I had to wonder how long she kept going. It could have been hours for all I know.

If Liz is in a forest and there's no one to hear her, does she ever stop talking?

During her forty hour shift, I was the only other person to work with her directly. I can understand her being keen on having an eight hour chat in the middle to get it all in, but there was that other problem...

Whatever chemical most people have in their brains that prevent every single thought from becoming public speech, Liz didn't have it. She didn't just talk constantly, she talked about anything and everything. She talked about... certain... things, girl things, things no man should hear, in detail, every month; a sort-of vaginal Tourette's syndrome.

*shutter*

Liz's quirks went beyond conversation. Someone told me when she moved to town, she met the “Welcome Wagon” lady at the door wearing only a smile. Liz actually once said to me while discussing her days as a young mob groupie: “You know, I don't see what's so wrong about organized crime.” Her husband was a horse trainer and she spent her five day 'week-end' working with him and the horses. It was apparent that she spent more time with horses than patients; on a few occasions when trying to raise some old guy's leg in the air to take a hip x-ray she would click her tongue the way one would when getting a horse to raise a hoof.

To write Liz off as simple minded was a mistake though. She came off as flighty to say the least, but she was actually quite intelligent and could 'zap' you when you were least expecting it. I came to respect her for that and I actually did like her. She was just a bit of a challenge to be around.

I worked at Thompson Hospital through the remainder of High school and college then I moved to Rochester and started working at Rochester General Hospital. I had the same job and did the same thing only on a factory scale with a team of other transporters (at least two of whom are doctors now).

Rochester General Hospital
Far bigger than this picture shows.

My entrance physical exam was given by a female med student. She was an attractive girl who wasn't much old than I was. She was extremely nervous during the exam, especially when she had me cough. I thought it odd for a doctor, whatever the sex, to be nervous about 'lil ole me. Perhaps that was her first time like mine with the deaf girl a couple years later, but at least I wasn't yelling about it.

The Radiology department was headed by a doctor who had a unique personality. He had a thing for zebra's and probability which had something to do with their stripes, but inever quite understood it. He referred to the X-ray department as “ARRG...ZAP” or Associated Radiology at Rochester General Hospital -Zebras and Probability. We even had pens and T-shirts with the logo.

 

Told ya!

The radiology department, like the hospital, was huge. There were around twenty exam rooms set up in a rectangle with typical tiled and barren hospital corridors around the outside of the rectangle and carpeted smaller hallways within. The inner carpeted portion of the department—the part the patients never see—was decorated with the eccentric creations of the head radiologist. There were many posters of Zebras and two actually zebra skins hanging on the walls. There were a number of humorous photos framed in old x-ray film cassettes, a “Deliveries In Rear” sign on the entrance to the barium enema room, many mobiles and wind chimes made from artificial hips, orthopedic plates and artificial heart valves.

We transporters had our fun. We figured out how to make a nifty blow gun by rolling up and taping an 11 X 17 'chest' film into a tight tube and inserting an 18 gauge needle through a cone of paper of just the right size. We could even get the projectiles going fast enough to stick the needles into the walls. It was all fun and games till one of our own got one in the leg as he walked past our target range.

The patient waiting area had one of those large photo mural wallpapers popular in the eighties. It showed an autumn woodlands with a stream winding gently through the middle. We used to cut pictures from magazines and place them discretely in the picture. We had a guy fly fishing in the stream, birds in the trees, animals in the woods and super models looking out from behind trees. The department administrator hated this and would search for and remove our contributions after every weekend. This made it a game to camouflage our collage well enough for him to miss. One day I saw him eye ball the mural from an angle at one end to try and see the tell-tale Scotch tape against the surface of the paper. There was a small orange bird we placed amongst the fall foliage that was so well hidden it was still there when I left.

Elevator surfing was another sport we enjoyed, but not perhaps quite as daring as it sounds. When riding from floor to floor we hopped up on the rails and stood in the corner with one foot on the back edge and one on the side. The trick was to be able get down quickly if the elevator stopped at a floor to let on a doctor or nurse. Another part of the game was to hit the emergency stop button while someone else was mid-surf. For the rest of the day solid floors felt like they were moving up and down.

Still it was a hospital and a big one. We saw plenty of nasty and interesting stuff. Yes, I have my share of 'stuff up the butt' stories--I'll spare you the details. I even saw open heart surgery when they called for a portable X-ray because their sponge count was off. The man's rib cage was agape and there was the heart in the middle of the red canyon plain as day and still as a rock while the heart lung machine did it's job.

It was at RGH when I first witnessed death but still not up close and personal. I saw plenty of patients I had brought over from emergency and perhaps even talked to, covered with a sheet later on in the ER.

Still, this was just a job and not even full-time. I was still doing gigs as a bass player and a sound mixer. I was mowing laws and working with retarded adults to keep one or two meals ahead. My X-ray job either started very early on weekend mornings or was the night shift altogether, which didn't always gel with music gigs. There were several times that I went straight to work after a gig and crashed on the ultrasound stretcher for a couple hours instead of going home. It seemed that every time I did though someone needed an emergency ultrasound. I kept the outside door locked. I would wake up when I heard someone trying to open it and be gone by the time they came around to the inside door to open the outer one. Then I'd attempt to get some sleep on the rock-hard tomography table next door.

I hadn't saved any lives yet but I hadn't touched a bed pan either.

Both were about to change.