Hospital PACU Story — Castle In Nicaragua
This story takes me all the way back to college. I believe it was the fall of 1992, my first semester.
The story is about someone who was in the class ahead of me, so he was in his third semester. The story is also hearsay; however, it comes from a reliable source.
One of my classmates worked part-time in the hospital where this happened, and it was a very very small Hospital. You might remember if you were alive sometime around 1990 our military was assaulting a castle in Nicaragua.
They were blasting rock music at ridiculously high volumes and cutting off supplies from going into the castle. They were trying to get Manuel Noriega to come out so they could arrest him.
Back to the story. the guy I’m talking about was in his third semester of nursing school. This day he was doing clinical in the PACU (Post Anesthesia Care Unit) of this tiny Hospital.
That’s where you go after surgery to gradually wake up and let the anesthesia wear off while they monitor you. As the Story goes, he was at the bedside of a female patient who was groggy just coming out of anesthesia and apparently confused.
She asked him, because he was the first person she saw, “where am I?”. His response to her was “you are in a castle in Nicaragua”. She screamed at the top of her lungs bringing Hospital staff to the bedside. I have no idea how he explained her screaming to the staff, but I bet her anesthesia wore off quick.
Somehow, miraculously, he avoided being kicked out of the program. In fact, two years later he ended up being my charge nurse for one night at Highland Hospital in Rochester NY which I hated. I didn’t like him very much unrelated to that story.
