DAY IN THE ER WRITING PROMPT
Code Calamine, a Pink Toothbrush, and a Crazy ER
The doc is on duty and her bristles are bristling
It was a crazy day in the ER!
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I’m sorry, dear readers, but I am going to stop right here!
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It was a crazy day in the ED! There, that’s better.
We don’t have Emergency Rooms (ER) in Aussie, we have an ED which stands for Emergency Department.
It would probably make sense to be like the Yanks and name our hospital emergency areas ERs because then folks wouldn’t be concerned that they were being rushed to a facility that specializes in Erectile Dysfunction!
Imagine how disconcerting it would be for a foreign male tourist who had been unfortunate enough to have suffered a heart attack during coitus, thinking he was about to have the wrong body part operated on!
I’m glad I cleared that up, now you can all relax knowing that we are not reading about floppy willies or willies in any condition of flaccidity or erectileness.
There will be many of you, ahem, throat-clearing, May More and Posy Churchgate for instance, who will be bitterly disappointed, preferring not to read on at this point. I did my best to accommodate them by saying rude words like willies, flaccidity and erectileness. 🔥🔥 🤭
Back to the point.
It was a hellishly crazy day in the ED.
Jennifer McDougall was running around the joint screaming about staff not showing up for their shifts. I swear, that woman has hysteria pills for breakfast with a chaser of an I am indispensable smoothie!
Without a word of a lie, Doc McD was fluffing around telling anyone who would listen that I hadn’t turned up for work because I was off swanning around in the 1950s with my pink toothbrush. The dopey woman should get her facts straight!
I came back in my mystery time machine the previous night and was in the ED on the 17th even though I had retired two decades ago.
The hospital administration had sent out a Code Calamine (emergency roster) to all previous ED staff. For some reason, I had been listed as Doctor Raine Lore and had been placed on the call list.
My last employment at the hospital had been as a Janitor’s Assistant.
I had only ever been in the ED twice.
The first time was as a patient suffering vile-smelling, green chinky toe rot which turned out to be nothing more than possum poop I had walked in on my way to work.
The other time, the same day as it turned out, I was paged to clean a pile of weird-looking green shit off the floor with my best janitor’s mop.
Nothing would remove it until I attacked it with a pink toothbrush and some striped toothpaste.
Worked like a charm but my pink toothbrush bristles were stained a nasty colour of putrid. Could never resurrect that baby!
Speaking of babies — on the day of Code Calamine, something rather odd happened.
Doc McD was running ineffectively around in ever-decreasing circles, staff were coming and going, mostly going because Doc McD was giving them the shits when suddenly, Doc Patrick Eades crawled through the door wearing a blue baby bonnet. I did not think it went well with his green scrubs and was about to tell him so when he pointed to his head and whimpered something that sounded like, “body swap — bubba!”
By this time, Doc McD had stopped in her tracks, mouth agape, wondering what devilish thing was going on with Doc Eades.
Because of my higher intellect, I figured it out and called a Code Pink. Which means that a baby has been snatched or something.
Security arrived promptly and dragged the badly colour-coordinated, bawling Doc Eades out of the ED. The last I saw of him, he was being surreptitiously loaded into a padded wagon by several men in white coats with well-matched headwear.
Things had returned to some semblance of normal.
I was leaning on the reception desk with a stethoscope dangling professionally around my neck, watching Doc McD trying to insert a catheter into some unkempt woman’s bum hole.
I knew Doc had the orifices mixed up but it wasn’t my place to correct her. Besides, the poor woman had to count her blessings that the Doc wasn’t trying to shove the catheter in her mouth — especially as the hospital was cutting costs and reusing stuff without the intervention of an autoclave between patients.
Mark Suroviec, a handsome intern, saw what was going on and became hysterical. I thought he was waving a prescription pad around like a fan to try and clear the stench away from the poor, bedraggled, catheterized patient, but it soon became obvious that he was concerned about the prescriptions, themselves.
He thought they were being written by AI because he couldn’t read them.
I stepped in and reminded him that no one could read prescriptions, not even the dispensing pharmacist. That didn’t help. Mark cut his shift short and left, whimpering about lots of 0000s and 0000s followed by 1s.
Doc Krystal finally turned up, obviously suffering bad effects from her shenanigans the night before.
She had been on duty for less than a minute when her phone buzzed. Digging around in her grubby white coat pocket, she finally dragged out her device and listened intently for a few seconds.
Without any warning, she chased down the still propelling Doc McD and screamed, “Code Violet, Code Violet!” which I seemed to remember was supposed to warn the staff about a violent offender.
Nobody else knew what it meant so they ignored Krystal’s hysterics.
“What’s wrong with you arse-wipes?” she screamed. “Srini’s in my phone demanding I ask him questions. He took over Siri’s duties and now he wants to answer my queries, day and night.
He’s stalking me and I can’t get rid of him!”
“Turn off your phone!” I suggested, calmly languishing against the corner of the desk.
Doc Krystal looked at me like she’d swallowed a lightbulb.
She stabbed at her phone, thrusting the silenced device back into the grubby pocket, and then peered at me closely.
“Aren’t you that daft cow that used to push a mop around here twenty years ago? Yeah, you’re the one with the pink toothbrush always stuck behind your ear — like a pencil!”
My eyes darted quickly around the now quiet ED.
People had stopped rushing about and were standing gaping at me in interest.
Some had the light of recognition in their eyes, others still had a catheter jammed up their bums.
“She’s not a doctor!” screamed the still-hysterical Krystal. “She’s that old janitor tart who was dismissed for pinching pink toothbrushes! Fraud! Imposter! Thief!”
Suddenly Doc McD began advancing in my direction, dislike and nasty intent etched on her once passable features.
“Stay right where you are, Lore!” she demanded.
I threw my stethoscope at her head and began screaming a code of my own.
“Code White! Code White! Code White! Stat!”
The ED was immediately thrown into chaos. Staff began to load patients onto trollies and head for the door.
Other staff ignored the patients and began to run for the exit. Still others, less seasoned, crouched on the floor and began to defecate. Apparently, they had misunderstood when they were told that Code White meant, evacuate.
The place was in pandemonium with staff running, assisting patients, and pooping in corners.
Doc McD, busy with extricating my stethoscope which had twirled itself tightly around her throat, slipped in a stream of steaming piss and slid quite heavily to the floor.
Calmly, and very doctorly-like, I walked briskly to the supply room at the other end of the corridor.
It was time to carry out the real reason I had responded to Code Calamine.
My pink toothbrush stocks had diminished alarmingly during the last year of Covid. It was time to relieve the hospital of its recent large acquisition and then I would be on my way.
The only other thing I had to do, when I got home, was to eradicate my name from the hospital staff records which I had hacked into the previous day.
Jennifer McDougall prompts with weird stuff like this:
Patrick Eades is playing BIG with babies:
Mark Suroviec, M.Ed. is paranoid about AI:
Krystal carries Srini around in her portable device:
