Monday, April 17, 2006

Excuse me,there's a bomb@your workplace

Night shift begins at the hospital just before 11 pm. The beginning of my shift is the busiest part of the entire shift. Around 11 pm. this Saturday, Cherie the supervising shift nurse tore into our tele room (all 6'1", 270 lbs. of her), red faced and red eyed and said, "there is a bomb threat, we have to send all 6 East patients to 6 West (which was an empty unit as it only handles overflow from other floors)." She continued, "One of you needs to help while the other one stays here." I stood up to volunteer and Hillary, my partner in the tele room, pointed to me to start moving patients. We asked Cherie how do we explain this to the patients (?!) Cherie replied, "We gotta tell them the truth."
The patients didn’t seem that upset perhaps they were too tired and too sick to raise a fuss about it. After we got done moving them, Hillary & I felt like captains on a sinking ship as we were the only ones on staff to stay @ 6 East, 2 floors away from where the bomb was supposedly going to blow. The rest of the staff was taking care of the evacuated patients. How could we not stay where we were; what if we left and a patient had a lethal heart rhythm?
Were we worried? No, there’s no way Al Queda is staying up at night somewhere near the Pakistan-Afgahn border saying, "Oh I know what we should do! Let’s bomb a mid size hospital in suburban Chicago. That’ll show the world we are a force to be reckoned with!" I mean really, who the hell would bomb a hospital? Also, how could they bring up enough bomb material to do any major damage? Maybe the whole thing was a drill.
I must say that a hospital can be an impressive place to work as they have a plan for every contingency. There’s a plan if there’s a tornado, fire, person kidnapping a newborn baby, somebody shitting on the floor, etc. All we did was follow the plan and within a ½ hour all of the floor’s patients were moved.
It ended up they cleared out the 4th floor, and there was no bomb. We learned that the 4th floor received 3 calls stating a bomb was on their floor. One call said it was detonating in 4 minutes. But it was not to be, we left work at 7:15 Easter morning safe and tired from an eventful night.

2 comments:

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