Day 3

Day 3: Palm Harbor Hospital, Garden Grove: Starting at the Bottom WC:1711

To return to the Palm Harbor year long experience at the age of 18, I will begin by saying that the friends I made there and the learning I made was very important. I was in my first apartment, my first abode apart from my parent's home. I had the joy of being paid a salary, despite how small it was. I made about ninety dollars a week. With this money, I had to pay about half of it each month to the landlord of the apartment building. With what was left, about $160, I had to pay for food, utilities, clothing and other expenses. Thankfully the apartment was furnished, albeit with rather plain and cheap furniture. At least I had a sofa. There was a refrigerator and I used the ice cube tray the first night to scramble eggs in to eat. With my first weeks pay, I bought bath towels and sheets for the bed, and a few pots and pans to cook with. Though I had little money, it was fun setting up my first place of my own.
The weeks passed, and I met a friend of a friend one day. His name was Robert White, or Bob White, like the bobwhite birds. He was 33 years old; I was still just 19. He was eager to have me and one evening he called and said he had to come over to see me when I got home that night from work. It was past midnight when he showed up. He had been drinking, and when I let him in he took my hand and led me to the bedroom. He began to put his hands all over me, and I got frightened. I knew he was too much for me to deal with at my age; I had no experience or wiles to cope with him. Somehow I got rid of him that night, and never saw him again. That is when I thought that being in the Marine Corps might be good for other reasons, for example, to learn more about men before I got into real trouble. There were two things I did not intend to happen: having a baby or being a military wife. My plan was to remain single and end my term of service still single. The life of a miliary wife was not one that appealed to me: months or years of being alone while he was off to foreign stations or ports of call, probably fucking every woman he could. Anyway, I was going to use the military service for one only: training and college money.
My experiences at the hospital were very interesting. I learned a bit about human behavior and issues. There were a number of memorable patients. One, a middle aged woman, rang her bell constantly, wearing us all down with her demands that we come to her room for all sorts of trivial things. On one visit, as I was preparing to leave her room, I was washing my hands thoroughly as was a must to avoid spreading germs, I saw in the mirror that behind me she was deliberately pourly a full glass of water on the bed beside her. I knew that she would then be ringing in a few minutes to report her water had spilled and could the bed be changed? I had never seen anyone so manipulative or so persistent in getting attention. Another patient was burned over 98% of his body. Every inch of him had burned but his penis. He had been in his garage working with a lawn mower or some other machine.. and was using gasoline to clean or fill it. Somehow, it ignited and created a wall of flames between him and the door of the garage. He could not get out, and caught on fire. He was engulfed and screaming. His wife ran out of the house to the open door of the garage but could not go through the flames to save him. He was rescued by the fire department but the burns were third degree and he was hospitalized for many months. His entire body had to be skin grafted again and again, and the new skin was being rejected in patches. He was a bloody raw mess in a quarantined room.. it had to be made as free of contamination as possible due to his exposed blood and tissue. Any of us who entered the room had to suit up in a sterile gown and cap with gloves before entering. So that he could go to the bathroom, his penis had to be lifted and put into the open neck of a urinary bottle.
Yet another patient was a fortyish man, very handsome, who had a sudden heart attack. He was admitted and while in his hospital room, he had the final attack and died instantly.I was assigned to wait outside the closed door of his room to stop any family members who might come to visit and direct them to the nurses station.
I had my white nurse aid uniform, but a hat was not required. At that time, I was smoking Winston filter cigarettes. (I smoked for just a year and then quit in one day... later I discovered why it was so easy for me to quit while other people have such a difficult time doing that.. it was because I never pulled the smoke deep into my lungs as one is supposed to do. I simply did not know that I was not smoking the right way.. so I never got addicted to the same degree other people did. What a blessing !) In that time I worked there, I ate dinner at the hospital cafeteria. My most preferred foods there was cottage cheese and crackers with milk. I had an ulcer condition and had to ease the pain with milk and Malox. I was young, thin, and anxious and worried about everything. I had no support network, no family support, and was not even dating.
I remember the bed pans and the bed baths I gave, log rolling heavy patients. I remember taking temperatures and blood pressures. I remember making fresh beds, refreshing water pitchers, and making notes in patient charts. I remember when lights out time came around, and the rooms were all dark, patients sleeping soundly. It was a nice time of night, when all had been done and we could quietly talk at the nurse's station. The women who worked there were genuinely nice people, hard working and well trained.
From time to time an interesting case story would drift up to our floor from the emergency room downstairs. Once, a woman had done her own abortion and brought the aborted fetus in a jar to the emergency room. It seemed she had been unable to stop her bleeding. Another time, a young girl was brought in with severe burns to her arms and legs. She was in a catatonic shock, staring into space and unable to speak. The doctors soon discovered that her parents had burned her deliberately as punishment for not obeying them. They put her into a tub of scalding hot water and she was seriously injured both physically and emotionally.
The apartment I lived in, a short walk from the hospital, was part of a complex of apartments managed by an elderly couple. The man and wife had no children living with them, but the grandchildren visited often. The husband had complained to his wife often that the noise of the children gave him headaches and he did not like it that they stayed so long and were so unruly. Well, one day I came home to find yellow police tape around their particular apartment. He had lost his temper with his wife in an argument over the visits of the children and its effect on him, and he had shot and killed her. She was taken to the emergency room but was dead on arrival. I do not recall what happened to him. I never saw him again and it was not long before I left to join the Marines.
There was another young nurse aide I met, Connie. I do not recall her last name. She spent some time visiting me at my apartment and one evening she said to me that she had felt something on her lower back, near her bottom. She said she could not see it, so would I look and see what it was? I was embarrassed but I did, since she seemed concerned about it. There was nothing there. Now, decades later.. I wonder if she was a lesbian creating a way to become intimate with me?
Who knows.. she is in the past. What became of her I do not know.. but I can still see her pale face in my mind. She was not a pretty girl, but had agreeable features. Overall, my view of her was that she was not that intelligent and would probably wind up being a housewife.
Jenna was another friend who was more interesting. She was a beefy blonde who always wore red lipstick and had her hair coiffed well, with a pinned up french roll type of style. She laughed a lot and told great jokes, sometimes raucus ones. She smoked at breaktimes, and did more than her share of the unpleasant duties. She never failed to jump in and help out when someone else needed it. I learned quite a bit from her about how to approach work: with a sense of humor and holding no efforts back. She never hesitated to do what needed to be done. Then there was Tuitoga Fanini, a Samoan woman who had the habit of not being found when some critical situation would arise. No one had any idea where she hid; she just was not as available. Her disappearance was the reason I was posted at the door of the heart attack guy.. because no one had been able to locate her. Finally she ambled down the hall; most likely she had gone to the cafeteria to sit and have a tea.