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7:52 p.m. - 2014-06-27
A NO STORY STORY
It was not a good night in the Pharmacy Department at Nosocomial General.

When I walked onto the OR-ICU satellite, Bob the afternoon pharmacist was already in his seat at the computer. He leaned back in his chair, clasped his thick hands behind his head, and greeted me with an uncharacteristic lack of sarcasm. Unfortunately, and as usual, Bob was wearing scrubs that were too short even for his chunky torso, and the act of leaning back led inevitably to exposing his hard round belly, like a pink basketball, to my embarrassed view.

I don't know if he does this on purpose. Bob is in his late fifties, unhappily married, with children older than I. And if a Stay Puft marshmallow midriff is his idea of looking seductive, then we see the world very differently.

But things didn't really start falling apart until a couple of hours into the shift when the pneumatic tube station went down. We depend on it for getting stat meds to the nursing units and for receiving equally stat backup supplies from the basement pharmacy, so no tube station means I do a lot of running. Then the automatic dispensing machines went off line, which meant more running.

Things seemed to be calming down when suddenly the phone calls came one after the other. I'd be on one line while Bob and the other pharmacist were on the other two, and as soon as one of us hung up,the phone would be ringing again already. We figured out in a slow incremental learning impaired way that the Physician Expedited Computer Ordering System (PECOS) had stopped working. For three hours doctors and nurses had been putting in orders to the pharmacy that never reached us. We were getting angry phone calls about missing meds and long overdue stats. No one in the computer support department had thought it worthwhile to announce that the system was down.

"I thought there weren't very many orders in the queue," remarked Bob in a self-congratulatory way, proud of his hindsight wisdom and leaning back to expose his rose' gut.

Once the computer entry system was fixed, we were bombarded with all the orders that had been missing for hours in computer limbo. And I was kept busy mixing first dose IVs and delivering them to the floors.

So not a good night.

I met Irene and Myka for breakfast the next morning and started to tell them about all my bad stuff at work the night before. I was about a sentence and a half into my story when Myka's eyes glazed over. She started tapping Irene on the forearm with her index finger like a Morse code message.

"Somebody's phone is ringing," Myka said urgently, in case the Morse code wasn't getting through.

Irene looked surprised first and disgusted second.

"I can tell if my phone is ringing, and it's not ringing," she told Myka impatiently.

They discussed this important point for several minutes while my story died in utero.

Once I had a pet turtle with a longer attention span than Myka.

What good is having bad things happen if you can't at least get a story out of it?

 

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