Do you remember Nurse Ratched in the book, One Flew Over A Cuckoo’s Nest? My friend George had a run in with her a while ago.
George comes down with this pain in his lower abdomen. It’s Sunday morning, and he’s had the pain since Friday afternoon. It is just getting worse and worse. He’s worried that it could be his appendix, so off he goes down to the emergency room of his local small town hospital. Unfortunately, everyone else in the surrounding area and their relative are in the emergency ward as well.
The waiting room and the long corridor leading down to the administration desk are choc-a-bloc patients. At the head of all this misery sits Nurse Ratched on her throne, behind a sliding glass window, a typewriter, and a wide selection of hospital forms all to be filled out in triplicate.
As a new patient, George has to wait in a line up on the left side of the corridor to tell Nurse Ratched that he is ill. Then he has to wait in the line up on the right side of the corridor for his chance to fill out the hospital forms in triplicate with Nurse Ratched; who only uses one finger and one eye to type. The other eye is starting at George and making sure he doesn’t show any signs of impatience or pain. Because, if he does show any impatience or pain, and of course he does, she types slower and speaks meaner to him.
Then George sits in the no-mans land, otherwise known as the waiting room, until he knows his pain is his appendix and he feels just about capable of surgically removing the faulty organ himself with the aid of his nifty Swiss army knife.
Finally, at long last, Nurse Ratched instructs him to go into cubicle 3 and remove his clothes and get into the hospital gown lying on the examination table, the doctors will come soon to look at him. He waits in cubicle 3 so long; he’s worried that everyone else has left for the night. So, back he goes, shuffling along in paper slippers, clutching the back of his hospital gown for modesty sake, through the waiting room and along the corridor to Nurse Ratched to inquire whether or not he can expect to see a doctor any time this century.
Nurse Ratched stares at George with her one eye. She says he will see a doctor as soon as he brings her a urine sample: the container is in cubicle 3 on the shelf. George goes back to cubicle 3 and there, fair enough is a container. He proceeds to pee in the container, but instantly realises that he is in Big Trouble. He’s been sitting so long on various sides of the corridor or in the waiting room, that his bladder is full. There is no way that he can just pee a few drops and shut off the flow as it were. There is also no toilet or sink or any other possible vessel to take the overflow: nothing but the container in his hand that is getting fuller and fuller. Oh gawd it is so full that there is this dome of suspended liquid jiggling a millimetre over the top of the container.
Mortified. Humiliated. He makes his way slowly through the waiting room and down the long corridor. He’s holding the container with both hands, so as not to spill any liquid, backside exposed through the gapping hospital gown, and he is furiously thinking what he can say or do to Nurse Ratched when he finally arrives at her desk. There has to be something he can say that will sting. Something that will make her realise the error of her ways. But, as he approaches the sliding glass window, he knows there is nothing that will wipe the distain from her one eye. There is no soul inside of that eye. There is no blood flowing through the veins of Nurse Ratched.
He delicately places the container filled to the brim in the middle of the counter in front of the sliding window without spilling a drop. Then he looks over at Nurse Ratched and mouths the words, “You win”. With that, George goes back to cubicle 3, puts on his clothes, and walks out of the hospital.
He then calls me to pick him up and drive him to Toronto (two hour drive away), where he gets his appendix removed the instant he enters the emergency room of the university hospital.
No comments:
Post a Comment