You Get What You Pay For

                The summer before my senior year of high school, I descended into a nearly perfect state of laziness and slobbery. I would wake up every day at noon and then sit around the house eating junk food and watching daytime television, only to repeat the process the next day. After about two weeks of this, my mother became so disgusted by my slovenly demeanor that she demanded I either immediately look for a job or remove myself from her household.

                Several of my sister’s friends had recently landed jobs docking boats at the local marina, so I showed up at the docks one day to ask for similar work. I was greeted by a salty, sun-bronzed man, probably in his mid-fifties, who identified himself as the dock manager. When I told him that I was seeking employment with his company, his chapped upper lip turned up in a sneer.

                “You got any experience piloting yachts, son?”

                “Uh, no sir.”

                “Well, that don’t help me none. You strong?”

                “Not particularly, no.”

                He shook his head before spitting a truly exceptional loogy through the gap in his teeth.

                “Well, son, I don’t pay folks to come out here and fuck around. I suggest you ‘seek employment’ elsewhere.”

                When I relayed this information to my mother that afternoon, I expected her to let me off the hook for having at least looked for work. But I had no such luck. She demanded that I find something to do, even if it did not involve compensation, and she pointed out an item in the classifieds seeking volunteers at the local teaching hospital.

                I showed up at the volunteer office the next morning dressed in my best coat and tie, expecting a lengthy and competitive interview process leading up to a coveted position among healthcare’s finest. Once there, I was instructed to fill out some light paperwork, which asked me simply for my name, date of birth, home address, and cell phone number. I was then called into a cubicle, where a young man in a T-shirt glanced over my paperwork for about five seconds before asking me when I could begin work.

                “Wait, don’t you need to interview me?” I asked. “You know, to make sure I’m qualified?”

                “Qualified? You’re a volunteer, dude. We’re not exactly picky.”

                “Well what if I was a sociopath? How would you know?”

                He raised an eyebrow.

                “Are you a sociopath?”

                “Well, no. ”

                “Fantastic. When can you start?”

                I was then issued an extra large red T-shirt with VOLUNTEER written across the back, along with a keycard which granted me entrance into nearly any building in the two-block hospital complex. My first assignment was to the post-anesthesia unit, where I would presumably be helping to care for and transport very groggy patients.

                The following day, I arrived at my assigned unit without any training or even the slightest idea of what I was supposed to be doing. The post-anesthesia ward was a massive room, probably one hundred feet across, divided by curtains into twenty stations, where nurses monitored humming machines while administering to patients in collapsible beds. I approached the nurses’ station in the center of the room, where a bored-looking receptionist sat, head down, apparently writing something outside my view. She did not bother to look up as I approached. I stood there for over a minute, waiting for her to address me, but she continued to write without paying me any attention.

                “Uh, excuse me…” I began after another minute had silently elapsed. I looked over the counter to see that she was tracing her hand on a pad of paper in her lap.

                “Can I help you?” she asked without taking her eyes off the pad of paper.

                “Um, yeah, my name’s Will, and I’m a volunteer assigned to this unit.”

                “Mhm,” she mumbled. “You can go ahead and start working if you want to.”

                 Although horribly unprepared to do anything of value, I proceeded to walk around the unit, which seemed to have quickly come to life. New patients were wheeled in on stretchers from the OR by med students, and the nurses rushed to attend to the new arrivals. As I walked by one nurse who was standing over a patient and busily adjusting his medical dressings, she looked up at me and snapped her fingers.

                “You, come over here and check his vital signs while I work on his bandages. Then when you’re done, go get a foot pump and hook it up to the battery on his bed.”

                I stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded. I had no idea how to do any of that.

                “I’m sorry, can you explain?”

                “I said check his VITAL SIGNS, then go GET A FOOT PUMP and HOOK IT UP.”

                Oh, of course. Apparently yelling the exact same command was now the equivalent of explaining. This same process occurred about twenty times that day, in which I would be woefully ignorant of standard procedure and a nurse or a technician would chew me out accordingly. I screwed up the setup of a patient station so badly that one doctor turned to me and held up his arms.

                “Jesus Christ, kid, did you even make an effort here? What the hell are we paying you for?”

                I indicated the word VOLUNTEER on my T-shirt. Seriously, what did they expect from free labor? You get what you pay for.

                By the end of the day, I seemed to have things somewhat figured out. I still screwed up, but mostly in ways that were not particularly life-threatening. While checking one patient’s vital signs, I apparently messed up the electronic thermometer and announced to the nurses’ assistant that his body temperature was 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and somehow this went unnoticed. At another station, I accidentally kicked over the receptacle for the patient’s external catheter, leaving a very large puddle of strange-colored urine on the floor. I managed to walk away surreptitiously before I could be blamed. When told to sterilize the stretchers after use, I merely brushed them off with a single sanitary wipe and prayed that the next patient would not contract a staph infection or meningitis.

                The next day, one nurse had apparently noticed my complete lack of competence, as she quickly assigned me to assist the receptionists in the OR waiting room. Once I arrived, the two receptionists on duty decided that the additional labor provided a fantastic opportunity to take a lunch break and immediately left me in charge.

                “There’s not much to it,” one of them said over her shoulder as she left the room. “The OR runs on a pretty strict schedule, so the nurses will take care of the patients for you. Really all you have to do is answer the phone if it rings, tell them to hold, then transfer them to the main information desk. Oh, and make sure the coffee pot stays full.”

                Baffled as to why it took two full-time employees to sort of answer the phone, I dutifully monitored the coffee levels for the next hour as the receptionists rapped up their break. I realized then that while the dock manager at the marina had not been willing to pay people to “fuck around,” the people here sure were. Either that, or that coffee must have been freaking amazing.

                Back in the anesthesia unit, I started to gain my bearings over the next few weeks and the yelling subsided somewhat, but consequently expectations of me skyrocketed. I was required to know the names of all twenty nurses on duty, and the roster was never the same two days in a row. I had to be able to tell Val from Valerie, Maureen from Marlene, and Kat from Kathy. I had to differentiate between Jen who hated being called Jennifer and Jennifer who hated being called Jen. There were three Sarahs, two Marys, and four Beths. And while I had to memorize all of these peoples’ names, for whatever reason they could never remember mine, even though it was quite clearly displayed on my name badge. Instead, they merely referred to me as ‘volunteer’, as in “Volunteer, be a doll and go clean out these bedpans for me” or “Volunteer, do me a favor and insert this suppository into Mrs. Jones’ rectum.” Some of the more cordial nurses took it one step further and called me ‘Mr. Volunteer.’

“Oh, please,” I would joke in response, “Mr. Volunteer is my father.” For various reasons, this joke never got a laugh, or even a smile.

During down time, I was forced to make awkward small-talk with patients, and I quickly found that these exchanges were made considerably more awkward by the more-than-slightly revealing nature of the OR gowns. One elderly man either didn’t notice or didn’t care that he wasn’t wearing undergarments as he propped up his legs, and he proceeded to engage me in a conversation about high school sports as his pecker stared me down for a full twenty minutes. I also learned the hard way why bikinis are generally not popular among the older age demographic. Some of those sights still continue to haunt my dreams.

Even those rare conversations that were untainted by shameless nudity proved to be more than I could handle. For whatever reason, many patients delighted in showing off their puss-oozing sores and lacerations, and others had no greater joy than to regale me with the exciting recent developments in their colon or bladder. And then there were those occasional gems that just left me speechless. One exceedingly corpulent woman with gapped teeth looked up at me from her cot and winked seductively.

“Oh, you remind me of my youth, back when we drank straight whisky and sucked off the boys down by the beach.”

I struggled not to gag.

My interaction with the patients proved most meaningful when I actually played a role in their care. A nurse called me over to her station one day to assist her with a middle-aged man.

“Now, Mr. Volunteer, I’m going to need you to restrain Mr. Matthews here as I insert a urinary catheter into his penis.”

Mr. Matthews and I both looked at her, wide-eyed.

“What?!” we shouted in unison.

“Ready, on 3! 1-2-3!”

I barely managed to grab hold of Mr. Matthews’ in time, and he nearly threw me across the room in his attempts to throttle the nurse, his face horribly screwed-up in pain.

“There, it’s almost all the way in. Now Mr. Matthews, I’m going to need you to stop struggling. Are you feeling alright?”

I turned to glare at her, aghast. You’re inserting a huge piece of equipment into this poor man’s equipment and you dare to ask if he is feeling alright? What the hell is wrong with you?

Another of my glowing moments of patient care came when I wheeled an elderly woman from the post-anesthesia unit to her hospital room. After making sure she was comfortable, I smiled cheerily and wished her a speedy recovery. She instantly burst into tears.

“The doctor told me there ain’t going to be no recovery,” she wailed. “He said this is the end!”

“Oh…” I croaked. “Well have a…nice…day.”

The following afternoon, I was told to go retrieve the same woman for a post-operation meeting with her doctor. Knowing that she more than likely did not care to see me, I opened the door slowly and quietly and stuck my head in. Apparently she had just finished up with the bedpan, because her gown was wide open the back, revealing her posterior in all its glory. At this point I yelled, she yelled, and I sprinted out of the room. Now I had not only made her weep bitterly, but I had also walked in on her bare-assed. Our relationship deteriorated fairly quickly thereafter.

One morning as I was coming in to work, I noticed that one of the trashcans in the central courtyard had erupted in flames, likely due to a carelessly discarded cigarette. Doctors and technicians rushed by busily without seeming to notice the six-foot-tall fire that had broken out mere yards away from the children’s burn unit. I rushed into the main lobby, where I shouted to the security guard on duty that there was a fire.

“Oh, it happens all the time,” he said, barely glancing up from his morning paper. “It’ll probably just burn itself out. No need to worry.”

I threw up my arms in panic.

“There is a massive conflagration right next to the children’s hospital,” I exclaimed. “Why is this not an issue?”

                Five minutes later, after frantically searching for someone who cared, I ran out into the courtyard to see that the fire had burned itself out.

                During my last week at the hospital, all of the security guards took one afternoon off to throw a party for a retiring coworker, and the volunteers were expected to pick up the slack. I was stationed at the front desk, where I was to direct visitors to their proper destinations while maintaining constant vigilance against possibly dangerous individuals.  This whole concept seemed ludicrous to me, because I imagined that a truly dangerous individual would hardly be threatened by me, a scrawny sixteen-year-old. Sure, I could point him in the direction of the main elevator, but I had no means with which to forcibly subdue him.

                About an hour into my shift, I pink-faced man burst through the door, holding the hand of a woman who was doubled over in pain. She looked to be about fifteen months pregnant.

                “Maternity ward!” he shouted at me desperately as they ran to the elevator.

                “Fifth floor!” I shot back.

                It was only after the elevator doors had closed that I remembered that the maternity ward was in fact on the third floor. I was sure they would figure it out eventually.

                Another hour went by, and several loud gasps could be heard from passersby as one man entered the lobby. His right arm was horribly twisted and mangled, with bones protruding through the skin in several places, as if he had gotten stuck in some machinery. He walked up to the desk and asked me in a very calm and even voice if I could please direct him to the emergency room. Here this man was, his arm mutilated beyond comprehension, and he was talking as nonchalantly as if he were discussing the weather. I, on the other hand, was panic-stricken by this man’s condition.

                “Out that door and to the left!” I shouted in a high-pitched voice. “First door!”

                Even as panicked as I was, I still wanted to try to help this guy.

                “Can I get you a wheelchair or something?”

                He looked me in the eye for about three seconds as he cradled his arm, his face blank, before saying, “You know, for some reason I don’t think that will help my problem.”

                Everybody has to be a smart ass.

                On my last day of work, I was told to take a released patient out to her car. As I was helping her get out of the wheel chair, she pushed me away and performed the most melodramatic fake fall I have ever seen. Her knee barely touched the concrete and she immediately let out a horrible scream.

                “Help!” she shrieked. “I’ve broken my leg!”

                I rolled my eyes. And the Oscar goes to…

                “I’ll sue!” she shouted. “It’s all your fault! I’m suing you and this hospital for all you’re worth!”

                Just for good measure, she added, “And I’ll have you fired!”

                With that, I stood up tall and held my head high.

                “I’m afraid you can’t have me fired, ma’am,” I said with pride. “I’m a volunteer.”

                Later that day, I returned to the volunteer office to tender my resignation to the young man in the cubicle. As I handed in my badge, I beamed brightly at him.

                “Enjoy the tort suit!” I said, and for a brief second I glimpsed the most excellent look of shock and confusion on his face as I left the office.

                On my way out to my car, I saw black smoke rising from one of the trashcans in the courtyard. I just shook my head and kept walking.