One Thanksgiving in the early-90's I was the intern on call at a local VA
hospital (a veterans hospital for my non-U.S. readers, with consequently
a primarily cantankerous elderly male population).
A
peculiar thing about VA hospitals (at least back then, I haven't worked
at one for > 25 years) is that patients could sign out at the nurse's
desk to leave, then come back later to resume medical care (don't even try to understand this). So the sheet was always full of
notations that patients had signed out to go to McDonald's, or buy
cigarettes, or smoke, or visit friends at the homeless shelter, or hold up a liquor store, or whatever.
Some bright
businessman had opened a strip club across the street from the
hospital, I think it was called The Jaguar Room. So on Thanksgiving the
VA ward I was covering was empty, as most of the patients had signed out
to walk, wheel, or crawl over to The Jaguar Room for some female
comfort and booze.
I was asleep in the intern's room
when the calls began coming in, all from the bartender at The
Jaguar Room. Was it safe for my patients to be smoking
through their tracheostomy tubes? Were the cardiac telemetry packs still
transmitting from across the street? Was there a place at the VA where patients could get more $1 bills, because they'd used them all up on
the strippers?
And my favorite:
Bartender: "Can I give Mr. Veteran another beer?"
Intern Grumpy: "Um, what's the problem?"
Bartender:
"He has one of those foley bags things, with the tube going up his
dick. The bag is, like, REALLY full, and I'm afraid if I give him
another beer it'll pop and send piss everywhere."
Intern Grumpy: "Send him back to the hospital."
Bartender: "That's bad for business."
Intern Grumpy: "So is showering your clientele with piss."
Mr.
Veteran was wheeled back over to the VA immediately, by a topless
stripper no less, who waited while his bag was emptied and then pushed
him back to the bar.
