So I started out on a rather humble level at thirteen. Maybe I'd read a book where cute interns fell all over themselves drooling over some starry eyed fresh faced teeny bopper volunteer. Must have been way into fiction back then. Anyway I signed up and the matronly Supervisor of Volunteers soon had me sitting around a table with other girls, all of us sewing dolls of some kind for some reason. Did I mention I don't sew? And I didn't want to learn, seeing as a sewing circle didn't seem a handy way to meet interns, after all.
So call it an inconvenient reprieve. They signed me up as a "victim" for the emergency crisis practice drill. On a blistering hot summer day, we were on cots in the hostile sun out on the hospital lawn, waiting to be triaged by the (hopefully handsome) firefighters/paramedics. I was really into it, having passed junior high drama class and even making drama club, but by the time they got around to me, it had kind of gone to my head, and I couldn't even remember my own phone number by then, much less what bones were supposed to be broken, wounds festering, etc. Or I feigned it. Go figure, there were a few puzzled hospital personnel who were not impressed with my performance of a scatterbrained fake casualty. And surprisingly, no hot date with a first responder either (never mind that I'd never had a date of any kind at all yet).
It must have been obvious that I wasn't just a one trick pony because the next thing I was assigned was greeter at the front desk so I could greet and shepherd haphazard visitors. Even though I have absolutely no sense of direction, I could do this, as the elevator was right behind me, so I could look up a patient name, give a room number, and nod knowingly to the elevator over my shoulder. One Saturday a middle aged wiseguy came up to me and asked me what exactly I was doing there. "Oh," I smiled, "I tell people where to go." He started laughing and said, "You do! Well hey, that's everybody's dream job."
I did all this with such utter finesse, that I was promoted to the medical floor pretty quickly! Soon I was running countless samples up to the Lab on the 4th floor and refilling ice water for patients at St. Joseph Hospital. Somehow I graduated quickly to feeding the helpless, emptying bedpans for the bed-bound, changing beds, taking vitals, and giving back massages in the evenings to relax weary muscles and bones and souls into merciful, if constantly interrupted, sleep.
But often these functions were punctuated by the very grim reality of people in pain, people on the edge, people with needs far beyond what I had ever imagined. At the far end of the 3rd floor was the Ward, with beds for men who were indigent, or at least without sufficient insurance. On my first day making myself useful by going up and down the hall with a cart full of ice and water, I finally found myself in The Ward, going from patient to patient, refilling their metal pitchers, when suddenly a hand of bones shot up from a bed and grabbed mine. Startled, I looked down into the bed where a wisp of what once had been a man lay, and as his eyes penetrated mine, he almost inaudibly gasped, "Help me! Help me! They're taking my body away from me!" I was paralyzed by what this literal skeleton had just uttered. Or was it by the sheer inexplicable strength of the grip he held me in? But then he turned away and released me as his strength and voice both faded into eternity. I never knew his name, but I will never forget his anguished face.
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