Apples

Mondays.
I worked. 4th day in a row. The census was so low in November that I got no overtime (we get paid the month after)--but the good news is I'd been sticking a little extra in my mortgage account here and there--and actually ended up saving enough to skip my mortgage payment this month! I guess that's what they mean about not living paycheck to paycheck. What an interesting idea.
A storm was coming in, we went from room to room covering our patients with blankets and moving them away from the windows. The sky got dark and the air smelled heavy, like rain, even inside the unit and more than ever I had the sense that we were on a spaceship, our little twilight ship, steering it through. That's what I am...the captain of twilight. Storms get me a little agitated--I went through Hurricane Andrew. I read an article in the Miami Herald about a year after that describing post traumatic stress syndrome--it essentially said that the whole city was suffering from it. As if we needed to be any crazier down there! Both our attending and our fellow are combat vets--Viet Nam and the first Gulf War, and Johnson, that old dragon, was stalking around giving poor little Baggins hell. Humiliating him in front of the unit. I thought Baggins was going to cry. Something must be wrong somewhere else, because I've never seen him so upset. He was speaking in this very calm, quiet, fuzzy voice, as if he were choking.
We have a teenager in the unit--well, we have a lot of teens in the unit. Scares the hell out of me. And one of them is double vented and very touch and go and a bronchoscopy was scheduled for 1300, but RT didn't show up. Fat Alice was our respiratory tech and she must have been having troubles at home, too, because she screwed up all day--missed my OR transport, didn't respond to pages, forgot labs...and she never does this...so it was really her fault, but Johnson just went on and on...and Baggins is going all military, clasping his hands behind his back and standing there like a sailor, the wide white dented scar that cleaves his cropped head from crown to occiput looking even whiter, because he's turning red. So I just walked up in the middle of it and handed him an apple. (I always carry a bag of organic granny smith apples--do you know they are the only apples that don't feed yeast?).
Baggins looks at me like I'm nuts.
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away." I say. Then I go back into my patient's room.
The pod just dissolves in laughter.
Tirade over.
I mean really, Johnson can't do that to our Fellow, in front of staff and patient's families. It will destroy their sense of trust and it's completely inappropriate.
Apples have gotten me into a lot of trouble. I guess, if you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian world view, they've gotten us all into a lot of trouble.
One time, I threw one. And it changed my life.
I did this when I was a freshman at Dartmouth. But that's another story, and that's my 1/2 hour.