An embarrassing moment

I said it before: In a hospital it is not always doom and gloom. Sometimes you can really laugh as you hopefully experienced in the previous post. But it can also happen that you – like me – experience something that you can laugh about years later, but at the specific moment you would have preferred to sink ten meters into the ground.

This occurred to me during an admittance into the hospital for an abscess on my buttocks. This abscess caused a fever, so something had to be done. After brief consultation, it was decided to open the abscess through a small incision. The decision was made fairly quickly, but after that I had to talk to the surgeon so that he wouldn’t put me under anesthesia. I don’t have any feeling in that place, which makes an anesthesia completely unnecessary, let alone narcosis. After asking me many times if I was really sure, he tacked. I was brought into the operating room, lying on my stomach, of course. An operation assistant was already preparing the anesthetic when the surgeon said, ‘No, never mind, I’ll do it without.’ The assistant looked at him with a look that seemed to say, ‘Dirty bastard, I report you to the disciplinary committee,’ after which the surgeon decided to tell her that I had spina bifida and felt nothing at all in that area of my body. Reassured, she then assisted the surgeon with the procedure.

Showering

Normally someone would not be admitted for such a small procedure, but because I could not manage at home after this procedure, I was admitted to the plastic surgery ward for a week. I was allowed to sit but had to allow myself to be assisted with transfers – ‘transferring’ from the wheelchair to the bed, for example – and I was absolutely not allowed to shower independently because I would move too much. I had to be lifted in and out of the bath, which was quite a job at the time (early 1980s) because lifts were still an attraction in those years. It took 3 nurses to help me take a shower. In addition, I had to sit in the Badedas foam bath twice a day to keep the wound from the surgery clean and to minimize the chance of an infection. The two-day Badedas ritual usually went well, but one morning led to my most embarrassing moment ever.

A new nurse introduced herself to me. She wasn’t really new but I hadn’t seen her yet since she had just returned from a vacation period. I was glad that I had already taken my blood pressure medication because Marleen * was a beautiful, sexy blonde in her twenties. Now I am not really into blondes that much when it comes to the looks of women, but she was absolutely gorgeous. She told me she was going to help me with the daily shower. Suppressing my enthusiasm, I told her that I was fine with that, but that it took three people to help me to take a shower because I was not allowed to do anything myself. The rest of the staff present knew this, so it didn’t take long before I went to the bathroom with 3 nurses. After showering – at least once wet and naked – I thought it would be handy to immediately take a seat in the bath with Badedas, at least I would have done that. The nurses thought that was a great idea, but then I had to go to the smaller bathroom where there was only a bath that was meant to stand in, not sit. In this way, the large bath could be used again immediately by other patients. No sooner said than done: wrapped in a huge bath towel I was brought to the smaller bathroom. I had been in that bath before, which was quite a funny sight in itself because my legs protruded over the edge. After all, it was meant to stand in so not big enough for a whole person. Taking a seat in the bath went like this: two nurses took me in both arms and the third stood in front of me to see if I would actually end up in the bath with my buttocks if the other two lowered me. That third nurse that day was Marleen, whom I had just met, as I said. Unfortunately she was too close to me, so it went very wrong. As I indicated, both legs were hanging over the edge and because my right leg in particular can hardly bend, this went up. Because Marleen was too close, my foot ended up exactly in her crotch under the skirt (at that time the nurses still had a skirt uniform). She screamed after which the other two nurses quickly lifted me up again. This only exacerbated the problem: one of my toes snagged on her underwear and her panties dangled from my toes a second later! She quickly pulled her uniform down, meanwhile cursing at her two colleagues. They tried to comfort her but meanwhile almost choked with laughter. And I? I really didn’t know where to look! Although I was not to blame for the incident, I felt bad about it all week.

Revenge!

Marleen was not mad at me; on the contrary. Once she recovered from the shock, she didn’t miss a chance to tease me about the incident the following days. For example, she had to assist once during the daily doctor round. She was walking next to a specialist who had come for one of my roommates, not me. This doctor had noticed that my feet were a little blue. It was still quite early in the morning and I had just finished the daily shower ritual but I was not yet wearing socks. My legs are not very well perfused, so my feet turn a bit blue, especially when they hang down. The doctor asked me, ‘Gosh, sir, won’t you get cold feet?’ Before I had a chance to answer, Marleen replied, ‘No, he just warms them up under the skirts of poor innocent nurses.’ The doctor did look at me, clearly not understanding what she was talking about, and I became redder than an overripe tomato. Marleen then told him what had happened in the shower a few days earlier. Her ‘revenge’ was sweet: in no time the other doctors (including mine) knew about it. Luckily she winked at me so I knew she only wanted to tease me.

Changes

When I was in the hospital for a check-up a few weeks later, I decided to go to the ward where I had been a few weeks earlier to see if there still were patients that were there when I was there. The first one I came across was Marleen, who told me she was leaving the hospital soon. She planned to work as a psychiatric nurse. A tough choice, what would have made her decide to do so? 🙂 By the way, I also noticed that when I came to the hospital a few years later – this time to visit someone – the female nurses were all wearing trousers, just like their male colleagues. Hmmmm, what would have been the reason for that?

*The name is fictitious