Service with a Smile

My husband had to go to the ER this morning. He started having some abdominal pain over the weekend, but last night it got horrible enough that he chose to go to a hospital. My father came and got him. As soon as Zane was awake, I took him to my parent's house and went to the hospital.

While we were back in an exam room, waiting to see the doctor, I noticed a commotion in the hall. Two elderly women, one with a walker, were 'chasing' after a nurse, both talking at the same time. The nurse herded them into an exam room. A few minutes later, another nurse was being stalked by these two. She also herded them back into their exam room. This happened about six times in an hour. In that time, I figured out that the woman with the walker was the patient, and the other lady was her BFF or sister. The BFF was apparently hard of hearing; there was a lot of "WHAT?" going on.

What I gathered from overhearing(they were loud!) and observing(they kept walking by!) was that if the woman with the walker so much as twitched, her BFF had to get the nurse. But when the friend left the room to get the nurse, the walker woman had to follow her.

Larry was in a hospital bed, not feeling happy at all(kidney stone, they think), speaking to the nurse, when all of a sudden the BFF just walked into the room.

"You can't be in here." the nurse spoke in a firm voice.

"She needs her blood pressure taken," the BFF said, as if the nurse hadn't said a word and Larry and I weren't there.

"You can't be in here!" the nurse repeated, a little louder.

"WHAT?" the BFF cocked her head to the side, as most hard of hearing people do.

"YOU CANNOT BE IN HERE!" Louder this time.

"WHAT?"

At this point, I am onto this woman's game.

She's trying to cut her friend ahead in the line by being obnoxious! In order to get the woman to get the heck out of that ER, the nurse would have to drop every other patient she was seeing, no matter how much more seriously ill they were, to take care of some woman who didn't really look all that ill to me.

I've seen this kind of con before, mostly at concerts where women will do anything to avoid waiting in the line for the ladies' room. I just never thought to see it in a hospital. I also never thought to see it being tried by ladies in their eighties! But I guess it makes a weird sort of sense--they aren't exactly going to any rock concerts, but that doesn't mean that they want to wait in line.

Fortunately for Larry, this nurse had no intention of dropping everything to cater to those women. She also had seen this sort of thing before. She very firmly herded the BFF out of Larry's room and closed the door. Then she finished what she was there to do, which was remove the various tubes and wires that had been stuck into my husband so we could go home.

And for that, he is eternally grateful.