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Miller H Caldwell, click here
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When anything in the hospital ward can go wrong, I'm there!
By My Own Admission
First published in The Good Health Magazine
0ctober/November 1986
I returned to hospital, this time to have my sinuses washed out. I expected everything to go as smoothly as they had the first time around. How wrong I was!
I made my way to Ward 3B and chose a bed. The ward nurse remembered me and remarked that I would not have forgotten the ropes. I agreed. I confidently secured the irreversible studded namelet round my left wrist only to see it drop onto the polished floor seconds later. A new namelet was brought and fastened in the style of a double clove hitch by a dismayed nurse.
I was sitting up in bed now with a thermometer under my left arm at the same time as presenting my right arm to have my blood pressure checked. It was normal but where was the thermometer? In concentrating on the pressure being applied to my right arm, I had let slip the pencil thin thermometer from my left armpit. It lay beneath my pyjamas in two pieces. I reflected on another unnecessary expense to the NHS.
The shower room with its adjacent loo was already lit on my entry to provide a urine sample. I obliged with a modest sample, tugged the suspended light switch cord to save electricity, frantically noticing the plastic red button at the end too late.
‘Don’t worry Mr. Caldwell, you are not the first to pull the emergency help button’, reassured the quietly exasperated nurse. I deserved a £50 fine!
I settled into the ward and made acquaintance with my fellow patients. We each revealed our medical problems that had brought us together and shared our anticipated length of stay in confinement with each other. I explained that I was a prosecutor of juveniles in court – a reporter to the children’s panels.
That information led to sharing the story of the Sheriff some time ago who lived in Troon and relied on friends to run him to work at the Kilmarnock Sheriff Court some nine miles away. One morning he accepted a lift from a lorry driver. As they reached the 40mph limit on the outskirts of town the lorry slowed down to 32mph. On reaching the 30mph limit, the driver slowed down to 22mph.
‘Taking it easy?’ enquired the Sheriff.
‘Aye, there’s a bastard of a Sheriff in Kilmarnock an’ I’m no losing my licence over him.’
On reaching the centre of town the Sheriff asked to be dropped off. As the lorry pulled into the kerb, the grateful passenger took a £10 note from his wallet and thrust it into the lorry driver’s hand.
‘There. That’s from your friendly bastard, the Sheriff!’
As the recently acquired captive audience showed their appreciation, an elderly man stirred from the bed to my left.
‘It was only £5, sir, and I should know. I was the Sheriff.
The anaesthetic could not come quickly enough.
© Miller Caldwell
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M.Rose
Love the title! Absolutely funny. Thanks for sharing.
Cynthia
(((HUGS))) and love, your friend in Tx., Karen Lynn. :)