Amusing Musings
Questions answered and answers questioned about life in the OR.
H
ow did the coroner know he was examining an OR nurse?
Three dead (ha!) giveaways: an empty stomach, a 3,000 ml
extended bladder and bilateral bitemarks on her butt. The
joints held more clues: bone-on-bone knees, frozen shoulder, knobby
knuckles and carpal tunnel syndrome. There were also deep bite teeth
marks in the tongue, likely from the nurse biting it to keep from
telling a lot of people to "get" off.
Yep, that sounds about right.
• • •
I know we need to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act,
but I still don't get why we have to mount a tactile Braille sign display-
ing the room number outside each OR. Do we have sight-challenged
staff working in the OR? If so, doesn't the charting need to be in
Braille?
And what about the restroom in the female locker room? One of the
stalls is wheelchair-accessible, but you can't get to the wheelchair-
accessible restroom because the poorly
designed dressing room makes it wheel-
chair-impossible.
• • •
Our facility's nice wide hallways turn into
mean one-way streets when they become
crowded with double-parked equipment,
case carts, implant carts and bags of
trash not yet taken out to the dumpster
out back. Wheeling a patient on a stretch-
er to or from the OR is like playing demo-
lition derby. Wham!!! I get points for
1 1 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • A U G U S T 2 0 1 8
Behind Closed Doors
Paula Watkins, RN
• BEEP-BEEP Watch your step — stretcher com-
ing through!
