Thanksgiving memory re-runs

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.