Relax Said the Night Man....

Excerpt from Chapter Two, Ballad of a Sober Man: 





The inside of the building looked less like an academic center and more like some stately manor home past its prime. Tony led me through a maze of narrow, carpeted corridors with uneven, creaky floorboards and around corners until we arrived what appeared to me like a makeshift nurses’ station, as if the lord of the manor had retrofitted it in the tight confines of a hallway between parlors. A burly, serious-looking man in navy-blue scrubs, perhaps sixty years old, with a solid gray Afro, stood behind the desk, staring. I froze.

“Relax,” said the night man, “we are programmed to receive.”

On the opposite wall was a giant whiteboard, stretching ceiling to floor. Black electrical tape created columns and rows, forming a giant table filled with random symbols in combinations of red, green, and blue. The first column contained capital letters in pairs. It must have been a status board associated with resident names, I surmised. I didn’t see my initials up there . . . yet. Before I could even think to ask a question, Tony was introducing me to Avery—a young, fair-skinned, and chubby nurse with fiery red hair and a knowing grin, who would coordinate my new resident orientation. I became vaguely disoriented with sensory overload, andbefore I could think to ask him anything, Tony was gone. I flashed back to my private pilot training, when the flight instructor and I would be at seven thousand feet and he would have me close my eyes. He’d proceed to put the aircraft in a highly awkward orientation, then have me open my eyes, grab the control yoke, and return to straight and level to learn how to reorient the plane. Here, I had no training. This kind of disorientation was something I had never prepared for.

Avery led me into a small side room that appeared to be a clinical exam room, but which I would soon come to know as the whiz quiz room, in honor of all the pissing in cups for drug screenings that the residents would do during their stay. I remained there for two hours while....

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intubating Alcoholics

Image
In the past week I have put three alcoholics on life support. The first one was 39 years old. He arrived to the emergency department by EMS unconscious with almost no blood pressure. I placed my ultrasound probe on his heart and saw it was beating alright,  just very little blood was entering his ventricles. This is because he was bleeding to death. When I intubated him I saw pooled blood in the back of his throat. His liver was so far gone, so cirrhotic, that blood could not easily pass through it, and the backup and created high vein pressures on sensitive areas like his esophagus and stomach, whose linings themselves were eroded from the caustic effects of constant boozing. He was literally hemorrhaging internally, and it took many units of blood to even get a pressure back. He made it to the ICU, and later that night, died. We later learned from family that he had moved back to town "to get sober." Case two was  a 53 year old chronic alcoholic who came to me con...
Read more

Whiskey on the Walls

Image
Alcoholics in long-term recovery maintain a keen awareness  of any booze in our immediate vicinity. Whether sober a week or twenty years, we keep a heightened sensitivity to its presence in a room. So when my hospital chose to line the hallways with it, needless to say the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. These days hand sanitizer has become as ubiquitous as cellphones, face masks, and Bradley Cooper; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dispenser. Companies simply cannot keep up with the demand. This being the case, a local valley distillery came up with the brilliant idea to temporarily convert its operations from whiskey to full-time sanitizer production, and began to supply local medical facilities. My hospital has been buying the stuff in bulk, restocking its depleted stores,  and filling all its dispensers with it. Here's the problem. Distilleries using equipment which had been continuously producing hard liquor for years can't magically c...
Read more

Baby Soul

Image
It’s  Baby Soul Day! In my younger teen years, I worshipped the iconic band Rush. At age 14 I was small, nerdy, intellectual, and afraid of my own shadow. Geddy Lee's voice, Alex Lifeson's guitar, and Neal Peart's lyrics encapsulated perfectly how I felt growing up in 1980s suburban North Jersey surrounded by big studly Italian boys and athletic Irish kids.  Neither the albums  Moving Pictures nor  Signals left my turntable *ever* unless I was simply swapping out one for the other. I hid in my room, pretending how I was going to somehow be cool, be accepted, break out. 30 years later, as I felt myself inevitably sinking in alcoholic quicksand, I read Neal Peart's memoir  Ghost Rider . Having lost his daughter to a car crash and wife to cancer within the same year, the legendary drummer one morning mounted his motorcycle and embarked on a two-year tour of the Americas, riding wherever the wind (his HP?) took him. While journaling his geographic advent...
Read more