Slinging Bed Pans and Saving Lives, Part III

So this guys dies and goes to heaven where it's explained to him that everyone is equal. While in line at heaven's cafeteria a guy in green scrubs and a green skull cap cuts right in front of him in line. “Hey, I thought everyone here was treated equal?” he says to the guy behind him. “Don't worry about it, that's just God,” the man replies, “sometimes he thinks he's a surgeon."

In our society we think of doctors as special, our modern-day shamans. They possess power not just in the skill of their hands and minds but even the legal ability to treat our ills and save our lives. Not till you work with them every day can you really see that they are regular folks as well (even if they have to be reminded once in a while).

I really don't mind uplifting those who cure and heal us a little bit. I just wish people like nurses and teachers got more reverence for the magic they do.

It didn't take too long working in the ICU for the mythology and romanticism of the MD to loose it's luster. Most of the docs I worked with were residents. They were young doctors who by the hour, were making even less money than I was. Obviously their salaries would climb considerably once in practice, but most of them had borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars for med school and then they would have to be paying that back while they borrow once again to set of their practice and pay staggering amounts for insurance.

Attending physicians and surgeons were established and making good money but I was certain I saw more of them than their families ever did. They were always working, always stressed.

Then there was the incident: “Code blue, code blue,” the overhead speakers blared, “Parking garage, level two. Code blue, parking garage, level two.”

There must be stranger sites than a bunch of nurses running... and I do mean running, around a parking garage, pushing a top-heavy crash cart and trying to find someone in medical distress but I'm not sure because I had to stay in the ICU. Finally they found him, unconscious in his running car with a hose run from the tailpipe into the back window. They said he was a doctor.

After he had recovered a bit I went into his room to get his vital signs. I was flabbergasted! I knew the guy, not from Highland or from Rochester General. He was one of the radiologists that rotated on Saturdays at Thompson Hospital in Canandaigua, my first X-ray job.

It really hit me hard. He was a really nice guy, a good looking guy in his late thirties. He had a family with young kids. I had always enjoyed working with him but, obviously there were things I didn't know. I tried to treat him with kindness and kept and air of normalcy. I feltbadly for him wondering what in his life had made him want to end it. I was also embarrassed for him; to have something like this happen and be cared for in one of the places you work must have been a difficult pill to swallow... then again, he did choose to make his attempt in our parking garage when he could have done it anywhere. I never saw him again after that.

Though there is an urban legend via “Seinfeld” that dentist's have the highest occupational suicide rate, it's actually physicians. Factually, foodbatchers have them slightly edged out, but who the heck even knows what a foodbatcher is? Oh maybe that's the reason they're hurling themselves into industrial mixers at such a rate.

Though I still would work with an residents that I found interesting and attractive. I no longer had any illusions about doctors in particular. In fact, to me the MD was a count against them. Of course it was after I reached this conclusion that a resident expressed an interest in me.

It was nurses though who I worked with most closely. There is a stereotype of the ICU nurse made famous by Kathy Bates in “Misery” but nothing could be further from the truth. Well, okay there were one or two... Every one of them were intelligent, dedicated professionals and most were a great pleasure to work with. 

"You should have bought a squirrel"

Our business was literally serious as a heart attack but we had our fun too of course.

The chief resident, Conrad, was on his last night of being 'on-call' and we decided to give him a going away present during a quiet period in the evening. I dressed up as a patient and got in an empty bed. We attached a heart monitor to my chest and taped fake IVs to my arms. Conrad was in the on-call room where he had fallen asleep studying. One nurse ran in to get him as everyone else stood at the ready a few yards from 'my' room. When Conrad ran out, dazed and in his stocking feet, everyone went into action—except me; I just lied there. Not only did we respond codes on a somewhat regular basis but they practice codes we ran every week. I could only hear the goings on with my eyes closed. The crash cart was wheeled in the room, drawers opened, IV bags ripped. There was a flurry of activity all around around me. The respitory therapist who was in on the joke pretended to breath for me with an ambu bag which was pretty handy in covering my familiar face from Conrad. The nurses kept giving Conrad a made-up medical history for me. I was a coke over-dose which was odd because they also told him I was a surgical patient (hence a patient he had not worked-up). One nurse alongside me wiggled a finger on one of my heart leads so in the monitor it would either look like v-tach or at least have so much artifact that my normal healthy heart rhythm could not be seen. It was an unexpected eye-opener for me. Being at the center of a code, even a fake one, was actually kind of scary.

Conrad was still trying to put together this unlikely medical emergency in his sleepy state and make sense of the BS everyone was feeding him. Right around that time I thought it would be a fine idea to have a seizure which stirred the activity in the room like smoking a bee hive. Not long after that Conrad thought to take a manual pulse on my wrist. “Wait a minute”, he said in his Pakistani accent, “this patient is not in V-tach, he has a pulse.”

The gig was up. I sat bolt upright and said “I'm feeling much better now.”

Conrad rolled his eyes and walked wordlessly from the room went back into the on-call room and closed the door. Everyone else laughed hysterically.

As ever, I was a musician first. My career path in healthcare was by accident, a mere survival tool. I had been there for several years and was never even tempted to make it some sort of career. Anita, the department manager who had hired me, had left for another job. Her replacement, who looked like Santa Claus and has since tainted that image for me, had a very different philosophy than Anita regarding the technicians. This, along with some other factors turned a job that was marginally tolerable into moderately miserable.

Testing pee, dumping bedpans and suctioning trach tubes had never been my favorite thing to do but now those things really began to grade on me. I had always had a pleasant bedside manner and enjoyed my coworkers but my overall attitude was slipping fast. I was finding more and more that I just didn't care, and in an ICU, that ain't good!

I became so frustrated with my job and those in charge of it that one day when I returned home, before I entered the house I took off my stethoscope and threw it as far as I could. Later that night I jumped over the fence in my back yard, retrieved the thing from my neighbor's yard and gave it a good cleaning.

A good friend of mine that I'd met in drafting class in high school had actually become a drafter and knew of my unhappiness where I was working. He told me there was an opening for a drafter where he worked. There was the obvious problem of my never having worked a day as a drafter and that I had never drafted on a computer (our school got AutoCAD computers the year after I left). Throwing myself into something unreasonable was something I was getting good at. My friend helped me get set up with a cheap 386 computer and a 'copy' of AutoCAD. I went to his house to get a crash course then I was on my own. I spent every waking hour learning AutoCAD and creating drawings that would become my portfolio. I had two weeks from the time I got my computer until my interview. To say I was motivated would have been an understatement.

I interviewed with a very nice guy named Dan who would be another person that took a chance on me as a largely unknown quantity.

Thanks Dan!

Working as a drafter was such a pleasure after being in the ICU for seven years and being in X-ray seven years before that. Sitting at a desk all day, all by itself made me feel as though I was being fed grapes and fanned with palm fronds. I also took great satisfaction in creating the drawings even though those drawings were largely of cable harnesses and electronic assemblies.

I was even being paid more.

My time in healthcare had come to a close. Though I think I did it for several years longer than I should have, I have no regrets. I think there are reason's that things happen as they do. I met many wonderful people, several of whom I am still in contact with.

 Me working in the Highland ICU

Even more than that, I experienced things that have prepared me for life at large and for situations I will likely face in the future. I have stored away many stories and human experiences that I can engage as a writer and a songwriter.

I already have such a song from a patient's point of view. I have never been a patient in an ICU or for more than a couple of days. I never would have been able to write this song without seeing the things I've seen.  Here it is as a rough demo of the song: Dronmonium
The link will open in a separate tab. Return to this tab if you want to read the lyrics and tech notes below.

Dronmonium

©2005 Joel T Johnson 

There's a bloodstain on the ceiling
I stare at it all day
The IVs drip into this empty feeling
I wish life away

This life's for living
This blue sky, for breathing in
I won't forget you
With all my might

Through the haze of the meds and the pain
everything feels like mud and rain
I can't tell where does this bed begin
and where do I end

I feel your hand close round mine

This love's for giving
This blue sky, for breathing in
I won't forget you
with all my might

Fishing poles, snow, cardboard boxes, The Alamo
Driving home at three AM
Wind that bends the trees
Your hair in the morning
Sun so bright it makes me sneeze
Fire trucks, socks, cereal

It's time to go now
Gray sky parts to let me in

I won't forget you
I won't forget you
forget you...

Tech Notes:
While working on a film score the director also was considering having me do some sound design as well so I experimented with recording some bird sounds off my balcony. I didn't end up doing the sound design portion of the film and forgot about my experiment and recorded "Drononium" on the same tape but thankfully not over the track the bird sounds were on. When I first mixed the tune I heard the birds and wondered where the heck they were coming from. Eventually I remembered the experiment. I like the effect so much I simply left the birds in.

The bass--as in many of my song--is the main musical force. Not sounding like a bass--as in many of my songs-- the bass uses harmonics and a thickly mixed delay for a clock-like chime sound as well as ringing fretted notes for a drone quality--hence the name of the song. The bass guitar is recorded on one track. There are no overdubbs, no other bass tracks.

The actual low-end bass is handled by a Korg MP-1 Analog synth.

There is guitar in this recording but, you guessed it, it doesn't sound very much like a guitar. it was recorded by Dan Penn, who, if you listen carefully, speaks during the intro to tell me he can only hear music in one side of his headphones. Dan uses a guitar 'playing' technique he coined "Squee", where he uses multiple effect pedals (relying heavily on multiple analog delays) to create and shape a continuous stream of sound and noise from the guitar, often without having continue playing the guitar after the initial wave of sound is created.


This technique creates an otherworldly atmosphere throughout the song and becomes especially interesting at the very end. We recorded several takes at Dan's request. Just before I hit the stop button at the end of the last take he unplugged the guitar which created a brief but loud buzz. With all the effects and delays that single buzz became a rhythm of several buzzes as the various delays returned the sound at different intervals. The icing on the cake was that when I played back the tape the buzz rhythm was interrupted at the point that I stopped the tape but instead of it giving way to silence the tail end of the previous take was heard because I had stopped the tape further along for that take. At the moment where the last take gave way to the previous take there was, just by chance, there was a wonderful bell-like tone Dan had created. The chance edit made the two things sound like one magical sound effect that sounds like nothing I've ever heard that drifts off into the distance just like the character in the song.

I later created a whole 'mix' based on that one sound.