Re: Share your funniest patient stories...
|
|
More Ladies of the Night
Tricky Micky
56) Ladies of the Night
After our dramatics with the Lloyd family we were looking forward to a well earned break at the hospital but it was not to be. It was with little rejoicing that we heard that Micky McDonald’s catheter was blocked and needed changing . There are some patients you just can’t like and Micky McDonald was one of them This was a shame because we should have been sorry for him paralysed from the neck downwards after an accident fourteen years ago when he had fallen out of a second floor window while under the influence . There was only Dee who had a good word for him, but that was because he was an ex - colleague, a former psychiatric nurse she had worked with in the past; everyone else avoided Micky like the plague if they could, but with his degree of dependency,we were fairly frequent visitors.
Micky lived with his wife in a specially built bungalow just outside Craglee Bridge. He had retailed a small amount of movement in a few fingers of his left hand, and his team of nurses and therapists had been able to obtain for him a full range of computerised equipment, known as POSSUM, enabling him to live relatively safely and independently. It was a well known fact that he and his wife Mona did not get on, but she had remained with him, it was assumed because of the advantages she gained from the financial benefits and nice bungalow Micky’s insurance company had enabled them to buy, but she did as little as possible in the way of looking after him and was frequently heard to moan--well within his earshot--that his "time was up" and that he had inconveniently lived past his original prognosis of twelve years . Micky hailed from the Glasgow Gorbals, and before his accident had been a " bit of a lad," as Dee did not hesitate to tell us. He was always after the women when he worked at the large mental asylum outside Leeds ( where I had once worked also but before Micky’s time and something I never told him about! ) He had been ( and still was !) a big social drinker, ---- alcoholic would have been nearer the truth, and considered himself to be the Brain of Britain and Mr Charming Personality of the Year . He thought he was witty and amusing, but most of us considered him to be offensive and sexually inappropriate. It’s hard to say where cheekiness and a bit of naughty joking is okay and sexual nastiness creeps in; we put up with plenty of "dickipoggy" talk from men in our nursing duties, and you had to be able to keep things light-hearted and down to earth in the many embarrassing and personal procedures we inflicted upon our patients. Yet there was something about Micky McDonald that went beyond this harmless banter. He had a stock of dirty jokes which he repeated ad nauseum everytime you visited him, about actresses and bishops and the size of his dearly beloved penis, of which he was inordinately proud.
"Och, it’s had a good innings , " he would say, gazing fondly at his ,miserable limp appendage which peeked like like a frightened worm from between his scraggy thighs. " Its bowled many a maiden over, ho ho ho ! They say you can see it from outer space , och aye the noo, ye dinna know whatcher missing, gurrells! "
It was deemed best to ignore him when he was randy side out, which was his usual state of mind. He dressed all his dirty talk up with what he considered to be clever psychiatric references, quotes from Oscar Wilde, whose work he knew by heart, or Dylan Thomas who he imagined he resembled ,and the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Malcolm Muggeridge, not to mention his stock of Bible and religious quotes, especially the beautiful Song of Songs which was his favourite and which he corrupted into his own special pornographic source of sleaze !
Micky thought he was God’s gift and seemed genuinely convinced that we all secretly fancied him, and he was not above gossiping and spreading salacious rumours about his imagined conquests to other members of staff , though knowing Micky no-one took much notice. Heavens above, even before his accident he can’t have been much of a temptation, though according to Micky he had had more women than hot dinners. I somehow doubted it. He resembled Adolf Hitler, with a long spiky nose (which he gleefully liked to remind us, was an indication of the size of his manhood) and lank black hair, which he trained into a Hitler flick over one of his voracious black, raptor eyes .His mouth seemed to be set in a permanent lascivious sneer, and the rest of his body, which was admittedly wasted by paralysis, was white and spindly. He had never been Mr Universe, that was for certain. Unfortunately he was still capable of having an erection, which he was very proud about, though it was simply an automatic reaction over which he had no control or feeling. Still, it afforded him much vicarious pleasure when we had to recatheterise him, though thankfully he had a supra pubic catheter in situ , which went directly into his bladder via his abdomen, so we did not have to touch the horrid thing other than to nudge it out of the way ! (Hi "boowels" were his other great source of delight, for regulating his excretory functions involved much personal fiddling with his scrawny,
57) Ladies of the Night
unappetising nether regions. One of our team with some literary talent at her fingertips and who shall remain nameless wrote the following witty ditty : Michael and his mighty midget, when it’s in you must not fidget, eleven long and seven round, weighing nearly half a pound ! They came from far and wide to see, this mighty monster cock, he wore it wrapped around his leg, and tucked into his sock!
However, joking apart , to quadriplegic patients a blocked catheter is an emergency, as the build up of urine has a potentially fatal effect on the nervous system, causing a condition called autonomic dysreflexia and despite our dislike of Micky, we had no wish to be the cause of his untimely demise, so we made haste to his home without delay. Fifteen minutes later we were on his doorstep, and , having punched in his door code, inside his house and in his bedroom. The only thing was, however that there was no Micky in his bed. Brunhild and I looked at each other in confusion, then hastened into the living room, wondering whether he had fallen asleep in his wheelchair but neither Micky nor his wheelchair were to be found. There were, we noticed, several empty cans of larger and bottles wine and vodka standing around, full ashtrays and the remains of takeaway food. Obviously Micky and Mona, or Micky and his rough , irresponsible friends, had been living it up earlier in the evening!
"Where the hell is he ? " exclaimed Brunhild, half irritated, half alarmed thinking of his catheter crisis and his blood pressure blowing through the ceiling if Micky went into dysreflexia.
"Well, he can’t have just vanished !" I said, stating the obvious, though Micky had apparently done just that !
"What about Mona ? "
We dashed into Mona’s bedroom where the smell of alcohol nearly knocked us over. Micky’s wife lay flat on her back, fully dressed, snoring with her mouth wide open. Not a pretty sight ! Brunhild took hold of her shoulder and shook her roughly, but Mona only groaned and batted her away, mumbling something unintelligible laced with colourful language. It was obvious that she was as drunk as a skunk. After five minutes we gave up trying to get any sense out of the stupid woman, as Brunhild crossly referred to her. We had to think quickly , as this was not a situation which could be left to sort itself out in its own good time ! We rang Welldoc back to establish the time that the call had come in and were horrified to learn that the original contact had come through Quickhelp over an hour earlier. Micky was able to operate his own emergency button to the team, and they had it logged that he was a priority visit, but they had been busy that night, someone was new at the controls etceteras and so on, and the call had not been put through to Welldoc immediately as it should have been. By nowMicky would be dead or in dead trouble if he had gone walkabout, drunk in charge of an electric wheelchair with a blocked catheter!
"We’d better ring the police, " I said. Brunhild nodded, but suggested we have one last look through the house to ensure that Micky was not lying at the back of the settee or anywhere else, before we did so.
After peering in every conceivable corner we returned to his bedroom, gazing blankly at his computer and POSSUM screen which winked and blinked like Blackpool illuminations in the darkness. Brunhild switched the big light on and it was then that we saw the saw ! And the bed ! Micky’s state of the art wooden framed recliner bed had been sawn completely in half .
"What the hell..........."
Without further delay, we dialled 999 and a Wirralsdale- wide search for the missing quadriplegic was soon underway , while two adolescent faced policemen fiddled with the computer and tried to extract details of Micky’s friends and family from its innards . Brunhild and I, meanwhile, with the aid of a policewoman, tried to revive Micky’s lovely wife from her drunken slumbers. At length we managed to piece together a garbled tale of revelry with Micky’s mates, most of whom Mona could not stand, of an almighty row with her dearly beloved partner taking place somewhere along the line and her advise to him to p*** off and take himself elsewhere as she was sick of him.
"And how exactly was he supposed to leave home ? "demanded Brunhild. "You husband is paralysed from the neck down in case you hadn’t noticed !"
"Pity its not the gob down, " muttered Mona, flopping back on the bed and closing her eyes.
"What about the bed? " asked the policewoman, giving her a non too gentle shake. Mona
58) Ladies of the night ----59
glared at her with a baffled expression on her face and asked what about the effing bed.
"Exhibit one, " said the policewoman, waving the saw in the air, at which point Mona clammed up and said she couldn’t remember, and then went on to vomit up a copious amount of curried lager, narrowly missing the three of us. Brunhild and I took our leave at this discouraging point, having another patient to visit and feeling there was little more we could do under the circumstances. We left our mobile number with the police for when and if they found Micky, dead or alive, and with that made a hasty exit. As a parting gesture, Mona sprang suddenly to life, dashed into Micky’s bedroom and grabbing a large cardboard box, flung it and its contents after us down the garden path before anyone could stop her.
"Bloody well give those to the bastard when you find him ! " she shrilled, while we looked in amazement at the piles of catheter bags littering their front lawn like a colony of cubist jellyfish cast up on a beach . Well she could pick them up herself when she sobered up we decided as we sped towards Brunhild’s car and made our escape !
* * * * * * * *
After a great deal of phoning up and driving around by Fellbury’s police force, Micky was eventually discovered at his sister’s home , a small terrace house down Gallows Lane in the town centre . Apparently he had phoned for a taxi after the row with Mona and an obliging Asian gentleman with the requisite disabled vehicle and the initiative of a lump of lard , had transported Micky from Craglee Bridge to his new address with no questions asked. Obviously assisting drunken quadriplegics to leave home in the middle of the night was all a part of a normal day’s work!
The original problem with the catheter had been resolved by Micky simply directing his sister Milldred in the art of recatherisation,--despite his state of inebriation he had packed the requisite items on leaving the marital home-- and Milldred had managed the operation without doing her brother any permanent damage ! Fortunately passing a supra pubic catheter is a relatively straightforward procedure and at the end of the day, and Milldred was , unlike her sibling, a fairly sensible sort, to be charitable that is--Brunhild was more inclined to think she was a tad mentally challenged ---but without Milldred’s timely if hazardous ministrations Micky would have probably ended up in dire straights! However , it had not occurred to her to inform anyone that he had arrived unexpectedly on her doorstep at four o'clock in the morning! That would have been expecting too much from anyone belonging to the Wirralsdale branch of the McDonald clan! But , having found our missing patient, and seeing that Micky was no worse for his adventures , we got him checked over by the on call doctor who decided that there was no immediate reason to send him into hospital and he would do better sleeping off the effects of his partying and referring him onto the luckless day staff to sort out !
"So what are you going to do now ? " I couldn’t resist asking the wanderer, who was huddled in his wheelchair in the tiny sitting room of his sisters " hoose" as he pronounced it. "You can’t move in here. There’s no room !"
Milldred had a large family of "wee bairns " ranging from toddlers to teenagers, as well as a useless, unemployed husband who sat in front of the TV all day, but even the easy going and handy Milldred could not be expected to cope with her quadriplegic brother in her two up and two down .Still it wasn’t our problem whoever eventually got lumbered with him.
"Och, I I’m no going’ back to that ****** cooo !" retorted Micky, taking a drag from the cigarette Milldred was holding for him. "I dinna ken where else I can gooo!"
"But what about all your POSSUM stuff--you can’t manage without that , " said Brunhild, "and your bed ."
"Though that’s no use now, is it,"I added without thinking.
Micky looked questioningly at us both.
"What aboot ma bed? "
Oh dear. Didn’t he know? Was he not there when the foul deed was done, or had he been too drunk to remember. Brunhild and I looked at each other, reading each others minds. After what Micky had put everyone through that night, he deserved to suffer a bit in return!
"Oh Micky " said Brunhild sweetly. "don’t say you’ve forgotten already ? Mona sawed it in half . And poured curry sauce all over your computer," she added wickedly, winking at me.
Ouch, Brunhild, that’s a bit naughty ! I thought. Micky’s face was a picture. It was the first time we had seen him shocked into silence ! Though he was not lost for words for long. Having delivered the COUP DE GRACE we left poor Milldred to bear the brunt of his fury .
"Och, now, Micky, laddie , dinna take on so ......"we heard her fussing as we left the wee
"hoose."
"Och, ma wee bed, the *****, and ma puir puir PORSSUM !"Micky wailed. "Ah’ll f***** kill her when ah get ma hands on her, the cooo !" Well, at least Mona was safe enough from actual physical reprisals !
"What was all that about the curry sauce and the computer ? " I asked .
" Och ,ah couldna resist it, "laughed Brunhild, getting into the car. "The puir wee soul. Does he no make your heart bleed ? " We sped away from the "hoose" still laughing.
The following members say Thank You:
|
Would you like to comment?
"Now everybody knows I have to Pee."
