This blog would not be complete if I didn’t include at least
one entry of random moments in the hospital that were simply too funny to keep
to myself. I love people-watching to begin with, but people-watching at the
hospital is pure gold. Sure, there are weird people everywhere, but people at
the hospital are an entirely different level of weird. (You nurses especially
know what I’m talking about.)
One glorious example happened when I was waiting to be
picked up at the main entrance. First, there are No Smoking signs plastered all
over the entrance, and the smoking area is across the parking lot. Second,
people often violate this rule. Third, on this particular day, I was very
cranky, and I have little tolerance for smoking at the best of times.
So… I was waiting for my ride and I smelled smoke. This made
me irrationally upset and I immediately looked around for the culprit. I saw a
woman smoking about three metres away from me, right underneath a No Smoking
sign.
I went up to her, extremely annoyed at her disregard for the
sign.
“Excuse me, lady,” I said, a tad too sharply. (Yes, I
actually called her “lady.” Like I said, I was cranky.) “You cannot smoke here.
There are tons of sick people waiting for rides and we are all inhaling your
smoke. Besides that, you are standing right in front of a No Smoking sign.”
She half turned, but didn’t make eye contact, and said, “I’m
blind. I can’t see the sign.”
Yes, this really happened. I had practically said, “Can’t
you see the sign?” to a blind woman. I wanted to dissolve into the sidewalk. At
least ten people had seen this go down, and I went from vigilante no-smoking
enforcer to the woman taking a strip off a blind lady. It was mortifying. After
I took a few seconds to recover, I helped her over to a different area where
she could smoke (because God forbid she would actually put out her cigarette).
Not even five minutes later, a different woman came out of
the entrance and asked me if I had a cigarette. I burst out laughing. I was at
a hospital wearing a scarf on my head in forty-degree heat. I was clearly a
cancer patient.
“Did you just ask me if I had a cigarette?” I asked,
dumbfounded.
“Yeah,” she snapped. (I guess I wasn’t the only cranky
person that day.)
I laughed and gestured to my scarf. “Do I look like someone
who should be smoking?”
She just stared at me blankly, still waiting for an answer.
Clearly her observational skills needed some more development. So I directed
her to go join the blind lady in the designated smoking area.
Not to be outdone by those two fabulous women was the young
man in his twenties with whom I had the misfortune of riding the elevator. He
was wearing a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, fully unzipped, with no shirt
underneath. He had a sideways ball cap and matching sweatpants on, and a tube
was popping out from the waistband of his sweatpants, running down his leg and
straight into a bag of urine that was dangling from his ankle. In fact, his
pant leg was hiked up so the bag was fully visible and hanging free. Yet he
walked out of that elevator like he owned the place, pee bag or not.
He was going the same place I was, so I ended up following
him outside where a group of friends was waiting for him. I have to wonder – if
you are meeting some friends that are kind enough to visit you at the hospital,
would you not go to a little trouble to hide your bag of pee? Quite the
contrary, it seems. This young man immediately pointed out his urine to his
friends (as if they could have missed it), and went on a very spicy rant about
how the nurses kept telling him that he “didn’t know how to [insert gratuitous
swearing] pee.”
This man was not letting the hospital wreck his swagger,
I’ll give him that.
So there you have it. Nothing profound today, just random
moments of hilarity from the hospital. If you are ever bored, or if you are a
writer or actor searching for a new character, I would highly recommend the
main entrance of any hospital. I am quite sure you will not be disappointed.
Thanks for the laugh today Rachel :)
ReplyDeleteRuthie
I am totally the person who gets annoyed with smokers. I would've told the blind woman to read the sign, too.
ReplyDelete