one night, maybe two days or two weeks later, while the nurses were drawing straws for their rounds, a young addition to the fold drew the short straw, and was charged with doing his rounds in the section set aside for the drunks and the junkies. a small length of hallway, dim and neglected.
ignored mostly because this town had no drunks or junkies or any such undesirable thing.
so this young nurse, we’ll call him “Kevin”, was slowly, carefully, doing his duty. slowly moving down the hallway, using a small battery-powered penlight he was given, in order to read the charts hung, almost cruelly, by ugly brown clipboards outside the rooms.
what they failed(?) to tell him was the fact that there were very few rooms and charts in which he needed to check. he realized soon enough that it was a sort of hazing prank the more senior nurses were playing on him. since he was the first male nurse to be hired by this, admittedly provincial, hospital, he stuck out his chin and sallied forth down the wing, defiantly shining his meager light at the walls where the charts should be hanging.
he did so, not expecting to find any charts hanging in their expected places, until he came to room #19.
the door to the room was buffeting against the frame slightly, as if a window had been left open inside and the wind was breathing through the small cracks in the frame. knowing that the doors of such rooms in a relatively modern hospital such as this are fairly air-tight, barring that the windows inside are shut, “Kevin” knew that something was amiss. so he raised his penlight up to the requisite place on the wall beside the door where the clipboard was, clutching the chart, and what he saw was something less than frightening.
after he read the small note, scrawled upon a Zoloft notepad and clipped innocuously to the ugly brown clipboard and, written in a slight hand of all capital letters, he realized that the prank they played upon him had backfired.
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