It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, July 3
The big news at the General Hospital Security Department (GHSD) is that Daniel passed his army test and is shipping out in October…I am not making that up.
Tucker had the details…He advised Daniel had scored a 41 on his test – Daniel would later say 66, so who knows – in what must be considered the biggest military upset since the Greeks rolled a horse up to the walls of Troy because his practice tests scores had been in the single digits and low teens…(A 31 is required to join any branch of the service.)
Tucker also asked for some advice…Seems he had asked for the 4th off almost as soon as he started…Hunter said no, The New Guy (TNG) had already asked for it off…Well, TNG no longer works here, so Hunter said it might be doable, tho he would later say it wasn’t and Tucker wanted to know if he would be fired if he called off…We told him that as shorthanded as we are it was unlikely but, boy, calling off after being denied a day off is not good form…We added you will forever labeled here as unreliable, a reputation you did want to have…Tucker nodded and said yeah, and we asked if he had considered bribing Daniel to swap shifts with him…It was plain he hadn’t, and he asked how much…We said $50 just might do it and noted there was an ATM downtown that dispensed $50 bills.
Tucker was on a patient watch when we got there, another teenaged girl who thinks the world would be a better place without her presence…Her parents weren’t there, either, tho that is not an indictment because they could’ve brought her in and thought ‘round-the-clock coverage was neither desirable nor necessary.
Regular readers of this crap know that when ol’ Sparrow is the only one here, sometimes a nurse will come and take over and sometimes this depends on who the house supervisor is…Jane loves me and can be counted on to send someone over…Andrew usually will, tho only if he as the people for it…Ann may or may not, depending on the color of socks she’s wearing.
Well, Ann was working tonite and the key here is not to go asking about it…As it was, she really didn’t have anyone to spare, and she came and relieved me herself at 0100 so I could go eat…Later, everyone was busy with a patient, so we left to unlock doors on our own at 0500.
We ended up with two patient watches…A little after midnite an Asian girl and her friend, another Asian, tho of indeterminate gender, was brought in and she was bawling so loud and so hard they put her in room three and it took an hour to get her to room five…Both slept nicely thru nite.
Before coming in, we went to the grocery store, the one near the retailer because we forgot to turn into the driveway of the Safeway we usually go to…We mixed it up…Usually we get some of those meatless chicken nuggets, and while we did get a sack of those (Buffalo flavored), we also got some meatless meatballs and some fake fish…Plus real tarter sauce…The plan is to eat the fish and the meatballs, and eat half of the fake chicken each nite…The big news, tho, is we didn’t buy cheese
Boy, the birth center was doing good business tonite, with no less than three escorts there, which is enuff to make you wonder whether or not there was a power outage nine months ago, forcing couples to get busy…Three is a lot for one day…Sometimes there aren’t any and, in fact, sometimes the obligatory newspaper articles on the first birth of the year doesn’t run until the second or third of January.
One of them came toward the end of the shift…We’re in the ER working the patient watches when the phone rings…It’s Cameron at the front desk, saying there’s a couple there and the gal had already had her water break (we have some zero clue what that means tho – not complete idiots – water generally breaks really close to birth time.)…So we’re thinking she’s pretty far along and may well be spewing the F-word every five seconds like that one broad did a while back.
Wrong-o…We get to the ER admission desk, and she and her husband are chatting amiably with Cameron, as she has nothing more pressing going on than dandruff.
The big news is that the evaporative cooler we bought to cool the bedroom while we sleep was used, on the cool setting, for the first time today…The fan had been turned on for the past few sleep sessions, but today was warm enuff to warrant the cool function…The fly in the ointment was the bugger didn’t want to cool…The green cool lite came on and immediately started blinking and, for a few seconds, beeping…This means something is wrong and while the fan is working, the cooling function is not.
Longtime readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall this happened last year, and we seem to recall taking the filter out and rinsing it out solved the problem…So we did that and BOOM, the cool function started working again.
The real fly in the ointment happened when the gallon jug we’ve had since last year, useful to fill the reservoir up with, sprung a leak, forcing us to make several trips with a smaller container…We solved this problem later in the day, going to the small-town hardware store and buying one of those large jugs commonly used to water plants…Bandit seems to appreciate the cooler temps in the bedroom, too.
Workout tonite was good…We did two sets of forms – up from one yesterday – and shoulder therapy was strong…The first set was with 5-lb weights, the second and third with eight pounders and we even did a four or five side lateral raises with 10-lb weights, just for funsies, and these felt strong, too…There is no reason to rush anything, tho…We can still reach for our wallet without pain, but reaching for the flashlight on our duty belt still hurts a bit.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Thursday until 1700 Thursday…8.5 hours for the day and 36 hours for the week, both excellent totals.
———
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Click here to get to know Gaylon’s latest book: The Life 101 Project.
